The Killer I Created
by T.R. Samuels
Summary: After capturing a new type of terminator, General Connor faces a personal crisis while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the ‘Only Lonely’ series.
1. Chapter 1

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 1  
****T.R. Samuels**

Allison Young was dragged by her spindly arms through the murky metal passageway, her meek form splayed like a fallen scarecrow between the might of the two terminators as they hauled her through the gloom. Her flesh bruised beneath the hydraulic vice of unyielding metal as her legs dragged out behind her, kicking uselessly against the grimy floor as she was pulled deeper into the soulless facility.

"Where are you taking me?!"

The metal warriors strode on, boots echoing, faces taut with indomitable will as they loomed upon an old steel door pealing with paint and rust. One of them extended a muscular arm, thrusting the portal open in a yawing whine like the gates of an ancient castle, revealing a creaky metal staircase that led down into darkness.

Horror sank inside her like a rusty nail, her body stiffening against their grip, unleashing a reserve of strength and defiance as she struggled in a wild flurry of resistance. The machines watched dispassionately as she clawed against them like a scalded cat, their hold on her never threatened as she scratched and yelled and her teeth sank down until she tasted metal.

Before long she had exhausted herself, sinking uselessly in a pile of defeat where they hauled her back onto uneven legs, marching down into the blackness of an unhallowed dungeon. A place of suffering and nightmares she had been every night in her dreams. Scabby walls pealing with paint and rust, water and mildew fermenting with the tang of oily metal as a light bulb sizzled to life at the end of a cobwebbed chain, illuminating the chamber in all its hellish detail.

At the centre lay a menacing chair and table, metal and carbon fibre, polished and new, the legs fastened to the uneven floor with industrial bolts and welding. She hung limply in one of the machine's grasp, legs twisted beneath her as she shivered against the cold, watching as its partner prepared the appliances of the torturous berth.

Her eyes glistened as they slid over the blood-stained floor of Skynet's charnel house, her voice whimpering in a last crush of finality.

This was the end of the line.

Once the machine had finished she was yanked into the chair, limbs bending painfully against inhuman strength as built-in restraints were snapped shut over her wrists and ankles. She screamed as one of them seized a fistful of hair, holding her head as the other fitted a metal collar around her neck, pulling her against the back of the chair where it was anchored with a length of industrial cord.

_Human beings have a strength that can't be measured. Human beings have a strength that can't be measured._

She repeated the mantra back to herself the way John Connor had taught her, gleaning the strength that the words evoked as the machines marched out and the door slammed shut behind them, abandoning her to the deafening silence.

_Human beings have a strength that can't be measured. Human beings have a…_

Her face contorted, tears spilling over her cheeks. It was useless; the words feeling hollow and feeble in the face of certain doom.

She had never been so scared in her life.

All she wanted was to be far away from this nightmarish place. For the building to rock with some distant explosion and the sound of gunfire grow near. For the door to burst open and John to be standing there, the tunnel beyond a graveyard of smashed metal, wrap her in his arms and take her home to the place she was warm and safe.

In a screech of metal and blinding light the door swung open, flooding the dungeon with pallid radiance, soaring her heart as though her prayers had been answered as her senses were barraged by light. The heat from its source prickled her skin, blinding her to all beyond the brightness as the sound of footsteps approached and the light was placed on the table.

"_What's your name?"_

The voice seemed strange and distorted, alien to her as she squinted through the glare. She dug deep and remembered Johns' words again, finding that last vestige of defiance that overcame all fear and doubt.

"My name? Why should I tell you?"

Her answer was silence and she sat firm in the dazzling haze.

"_Where are you from?"_

Defiance turned venomous, her teeth gritting together. "Why does it matter? It's not there anymore."

She almost jumped out of her skin as a fist smashed down on the table, echoing like a gunshot or the crack of a whip before it drew back beyond the light.

"_I asked you a question! I want a fucking answer!"_

The voice remained ominous but the words where unmistakable; angry and emotional, impatient for her response and in no mood to be trifled with.

No machine would make that mistake.

"Wha… _who_ are you?!"

Allison watched as blurred shadow moved beyond the brightness, reaching for the light before it clicked out of existence, revealing the source as a directional lamp as it ticking itself cool in the twilight. Tears stung her eyes as her sight adjusted, the daze fading as she looked beyond the table to the figure that slid into focus.

Before her stood a man of fearsome proportions; tall and severe, short hair and shadow, brilliant eyes of emerald green glaring into her. His arms looked strong enough to knock the head off a terminator, his cheek and forehead marred by angry scars. A man forged in the fire of a nuclear war, every bit as menacing as his legend described.

When he spoke it was a gravely baritone, rich with confidence and authority, eyes vaunting a frightening intelligence he plied with chilling effect.

"John Connor."

His words rang out between them like a death knell, the instant they echoed aloud triggering a bolt of schizophrenia.

Deep down inside her, somewhere secret and in the dark, something began moving. A spectre in the darkness. A lurking monster snapping its eyes open in the depths of her brain.

Metal squealed and buckled in a blur of lightning motion as she burst forward from the chair, body wrenching against the manacles that contorted beneath the might of inhuman strength. The band holding a wrist snapped open with a metallic ping and her hand lunged out toward him, snatching for his throat, stretching futilely for Connor to her greatest extent where he stood stoic and unwavering mere inches beyond her reach.

"You think I was born yesterday?" His voice snarled with contained fury, looking over her dour expression as she grasped in midair. "You don't think I can spot one of you from miles away?"

Reaching down to the table his fingers flicked open a hidden panel, revealing a keypad of green and yellow where his finger slid over an innocuous button before pushing it down with a click.

In an instant, _Allison_ convulsed in a rigid spasm as the electricity flowed through her body, locking her limbs in a useless tremble and gritting her jaw like a vice. After a few moments, Connor released his finger, killing the flow and her body slumped like a discarded mannequin, slouching in the chair in an unnatural pose as its eyes lay open and lifeless.

Silence deafened the room; the buzz of the light bulb the only companion to Connor's racing heart. He felt like he was falling, the world torn out beneath him, downward and feet first as slow as a Luna landing.

With saturnine motion he flipped the keypad closed and slumped forward against the table, his senses coming down off an adrenaline high as a part of his world fell down. He felt like he had been drop-kicked, the will to fulfil what needed to be done summoned from the darkest depths inside him, ruinous in their power, changing him from within like a spreading sickness.

He looked over the aberrant frame of the replica sent to kill him, flawless in every detail, from the sound of her voice to the scar on her brow. His soul languished beneath the sickening sight and the thought of what it had cost to create it, but a part of him only saw what his eyes afforded. The innocent girl that he had known, cared for, entrusted with so many secrets and shared himself for a time.

With mechanical motion he prepared a syringe, fixing the needle and drew the plunger in and out as he stepped toward the chair. Her arm was stiff as he pulled it out, like opening a rusty hinge, fingers tapping the skin and awed by its perfection. The vein in her arm bulged to which he placed the bevelled tip, withdrawing a sample before pulling out the needle.

"I'm sorry…"

With a delicacy and reverence few had ever seen, Connor placed his hand beneath her kneecap, lifting her splayed leg and neatening it next to the other like the leg of an antique piano. Her arm he drew upward with both of his hands, placing it back on the armrest, the sculpted appendage that had snatched for his throat nothing less than the Venus de Milo's.

"I'm so very sorry…"

In the last few moments before she rebooted he leaned in close and kissed her, the ruby flesh of her cheek so soft and real before he snatched the syringe and its content, marching from the cell with vengeful intent as the machines swung the door closed behind him.

####

Within the vast, uninhabited wilderness of the Arctic Circle a storm roared in across the landscape. A mountainous and forgotten realm of snow and ice abandoned by all of humanity. Within the glacial wastes were jagged ice boulders as big as houses, temperatures that could kill in minutes, and howling emptiness for a thousand of miles in every direction.

High amidst the stark clouds of this oppressive kingdom an AgustaWestland AW101 helicopter, more commonly known as a 'Merlin', bucked like a thundering mule in the arctic turbulence, its pilot Andrew Falcheck fighting to maintain control as the aircraft came through the worst of it and finally levelled out.

Palpable relief spread through him and his backside gradually unclenched, his hand adjusting the heads-up display of his helmet as he whistled all the air from his lungs. He reached out and patted the rim of the instrument panel, muttering sweet nothings to his aircraft in the recognised and time honoured manner of the pilots that had gone before him.

His precious Merlin was a tough old bird, the two of them sharing many a misadventure together since she was rescued and lovingly restored from an abandoned weapons depot on the tip of Scotland, the Resistance sparing no scrap of resources or equipment in their relentless struggle toward victory.

A victory Connor had promised for years, but now, in the twilight of 2026; a melody in the hearts of minds of all who followed him.

"_That's your idea of smooth, is it?!"_ The voice of Lieutenant Bacchus crackled over his headphones. _"I've had smoother Egyptian whiskey!"_

The chopper-jock felt his back teeth grind together until he summoned his most affable smile.

"Apologies lieutenant, but all things considered we should count ourselves lucky." He responded before mouthing the word 'asshole' and extending his middle finger toward the closed door of the passenger cabin.

_Fuck_ Bacchus anyway. He had said from minute-one this mission was jinxed.

In a screech of un-oiled metal the compartment door slid open and Bacchus shuffled inside, his form bent over in the cramped conditions before he wrestled the door closed behind him.

"Lucky my ass! You said you could handle this thing!" The lieutenant looked out across the barren, featureless desert as he parked himself in the narrow space behind the cockpit. "Where the hell are we anyway?!"

"About four klicks out, not that we'll be landing anytime soon mind you."

"How's that, corporal?"

Falcheck gestured out to the pristine white abyss beyond the windshield, the meeting point between sky and horizon a barely discernable line. "These clouds keep moving in and we'll be in total whiteout. You ever been in a whiteout, lieutenant?"

"Why? Should I have?"

Falcheck scoffed without humour. "Joke all you want but if I can't put her down in less than fifteen minutes, we're RTB!"

"The hell we are! We've got a mission to accomplish, soldier!"

"Lieutenant, we set out from the _Charybdis_ with enough fuel to get us where we wanted to go then get us back. Three hours in, three hours out." His finger pointed to a digital chronometer amidst the wealth of electronics on the console beside him, the LED figures an ominous crimson amidst a field of reassuring green.

"We're coming up to two hours and forty-six? Know what that tells me, lieutenant?"

Bacchus rolled his eyes and knew he was there for the duration, listening to Falcheck and his litany of complaints. The young man had been a last minute addition to the team after their original pilot got sick and had to stay behind on the boat. Bacchus had picked Falcheck from his seat in the pilot's mess; his face a vacant expression, mouth dangling tendrils of tasteless spaghetti as the lieutenant had singled him out.

It was either that or wait for the preferred replacement to return from another mission the following morning.

The future would tell if he had chosen poorly.

"No Falcheck, what does that tell you?"

"It tells me that logically we should be halfway through our fuel supply, and low and behold," His finger shifted, indicating the aircraft's fuel gauge as it hovered at fifty percent. "We're half empty."

"That makes you a pessimist, Falcheck."

"Guilty as charged, sir. But that doesn't change the fact that if we don't put her down soon, we won't have enough fuel to get back…"

Bacchus felt like arguing, pressing his authority home and putting Falcheck in his place, but one look across the radiant abyss made the lieutenant as culpable a cynic.

"Give me all the time you can, corporal," He said, tone shifting down several gears. "If we can't put her down in the next ten minutes, we'll be going to plan-B."

The cantankerous chopper-jock was a born survivor and had not reached the ripe age of twenty-three by taking unnecessary risks. If Bacchus wanted to delegate how long they stayed out here looking for some god-forsaken airstrip, then for once he was not going to complain.

In the rear of the aircraft four Resistance soldiers lounged in the vast passenger cabin as Bacchus and Falcheck locked horns, the compartment large enough for the deployment of an entire platoon, cavernous in such wasteful vacancy. The rear though contained boxes and chests of supplies tied back with straps and netting, enough food and equipment to satisfy a small militia.

"Wonder what they're talking about?" Asked Specialist Charlie Pace, a well-meaning Southerner and the youngest of the team, boyish and happy to be here, balling his hands together and warming them with his breath as his legs bounced up and down on the deck plate.

Private Holden looked up from his tattered copy of _Frankenstein_, the team's emergency field medic, eyeing the kid with long suffering experience through the ill-fitting lenses of his glasses. "Probably Falcheck bitching about hazard pay," He remarked, flicking over a page with a moistened fingertip. "Either that or the lack of stewardesses."

Pace rubbed his hands on his thighs before hoping onto his feet, reaching for the handrail as he peered out of the window, squinting through the ashen glare.

"Jeez…" He murmured, cuffing the shoulder of the man beside him to wake him from his pre-mission snooze. "It looks fucking freezing out there, Carter."

Carter was a civilian in his late-thirties, pasty and undernourished, one of the few people left in the entire world that ever had any formal education. It made him one of the most valuable people the Resistance had, though he had found the majority of his time spent reminding others of the past, the ones born after the day of fire and brimstone that slid ever down the path of nescience.

Pace was no exception.

"That's nothing kid," He wrote off. "We're only going to the eightieth parallel. Beyond that it gets cold enough to put ice crystals in your blood."

Pace shivered at the thought, returning to his seat and buckling in as the chopper buffeted in the storm.

"So what can we expect in this place, Carter?" He asked as he slipped his arms through the harness. "You're the smarts of this outfit."

"It's called _Svalbard_, private. It's an archipelago with lots of ice and rock."

"And _cold!_ Very, freaking _cold!_"

"It's not the cold you need to be worried about. It's the polar bears."

Paces' eyes widened and even Holden glanced from his book.

"_Bears?!_"

The scientist nodded with grave intent. "Big as Volkswagens I've heard. And they attack humans on sight."

"I'll take bears over Skynet any day," Holden threw in his two cents. "At least up here there isn't any metal."

Pace nodded, seizing the silver lining that had sold him on the mission in the first place. Though nobody had mentioned bears.

"Relax guys, so long as we keep out heads together, we'll be back on the ship before nightfall."

Holden and Pace eyed one another, a little piece of the mission's secrecy slipping through Carter's support.

"That reminds me, Carter." Holden asked. "Isn't it about time someone gave us some orders?"

"The mission's classified, private. I only know my small part. Bacchus has all the details."

"What about the second-in-command? He must know something."

Carter just shrugged. "Go ahead and ask him then."

Pace turned his attention to the man sitting off from the three of them, after all this time still unspoken as he twirled a photograph in his hand, studying the image like a priceless painting.

"How 'bout it, Reese? What the hell _are_ we up here for?"

Between two crates of supplies and a strongbox of ammunition, Kyle Reese looked up from a faded Polaroid, in no mood to talk as he was pulled back to reality by the strident twang of Pace's Southern drawl.

He had just been off on vacation. A place he went all the time. To clear blue sky and sandy desert, all bathed in golden sunshine. The passenger of an old Jeep Renegade on the road to fate and destiny, ridding next to the girl of his dreams.

"That's 'sergeant' or 'sir' to you, specialist."

Pace made a swift back-peddle, deflating in an instant. "Uh… yes sir. Sorry sir."

Without elaborating further, Reese looked back to his photograph, content to ride out the storm in his own little paradise as the chopper hit another rough patch, shaking the cargo about.

"Trust me kid, you've got nothing to worry about." Carter spoke up, filling the silence. "Now on the other hand take Holden and Reese." He pointed both parties out like the specimens of a study. "Holden is the bright young black guy and Reese still wears his lucky red armband; if anyone's getting killed on this mission it's bound to be one of them."

Carter chuckled at his own joke as Holden flipped him the bird, eyes never leaving his book as the cockpit door slid open and Bacchus made his formidable presence known.

The running joke amongst the men in his company was that Bacchus was a T800 in disguise, the man's towering frame and powerful physique a stark contrast to the majority of Resistance fighters. Rumour was that he was a bit of a borderline psycho, eating the flesh of the terminators he killed to keep himself strong and athletic. In any other environment he would have probably run foul of the law and civilisation a long time ago, but in the bleak arena of the War of the Future, he was right at home.

"Looks like we're in the neighbourhood, so drop your cocks and grab your socks, people!" He roared over the din of the rotors before sealing the door shut. "We may have to jump for it."

The hair prickled on the back of Pace's neck. "_Jump_ sir?"

Bacchus nodded as he took position at the head of the craft, straight and tall, legs riding the width of the bucking chopper like a surfboard. Oozing cock-sure confidence and uppish swagger, he began laying out the imminent sequence of events.

"Our pilot, and I use the term in its broadest possible sense, is unconvinced he will be able to put us down in the severe weather before we run out of fuel for the return journey. If that happens we will be deploying via parachute to the target area. Any questions?"

A shivering hand raised in the compartment.

"What is it Pace?"

"What's the mission, sir?"

"_Classified_ until we arrive on site. Anything else?"

Pace raised his hand halfway and Holden rolled his eyes before the young private thought better of it.

Bacchus then moved down the cabin, his muscular arm flexing as he gripped the handrail on the ceiling to steady himself as he advanced upon Reese.

"Now I won't lie to you gentlemen; it's cold enough to freeze piss out there, but this mission has come down from the top! From John Connor himself and God-as-my-witness we are going to see it through!"

With the lightening speed of a cobra strike, Bacchus snatched the photograph from Reese's grasp before the sergeant had realised what had happened, his gaze and mind only half in the briefing. He had to bite back the instinctual response of a swift knee to the lieutenant's happy sack and settle for diplomacy instead.

"That's mine, sir!"

"Relax, sergeant. I'm just taking a look at what keeps your head out of the game."

Bacchus ran his eyes over the snapshot, turning it over between his finger and thumb like a beer-stained playing card.

"Who's this then? Your piece of ass on the side?"

Reese felt his cheeks colouring, like a teenager busted with porn, his most sacred and personal possession on display to a crowd of degenerates for all the world to see.

"Let's take a look sir!" Came Pace's eager request.

Bacchus handed it over and Reese slumped back in his chair, watching as Carter leaned closer for a better angle and even Holden abandoned his book, listening as the three of them studied it with glee.

"Whoa! Who the hell's this then?" The Southerner cried as his eyes nearly bulged from their sockets. "I see why you hang onto it, sarge!" He whistled through his teeth, leering at the picture with an appreciative nod. "She is one hundred percent _MILF_!"

Reese felt a surge of fury flash through him, passing as soon as it came, launching him out of his seat and snatching the photo back. He looked it over like an ancient parchment for any damage that may have been caused.

Pace immediately deflated, the cockiness draining in an instant as Carter slid off from his side and Holden drew his book to his face.

"That's John Connor's mother, private," Bacchus revealed, not the least bit concerned. "So be careful what you say in front of Reese."

"Reese knows Connor?"

"Sure does. The two of them did time together in Century."

"No shit?!"

Bacchus smiled as he belted himself in the chair at the head of the cabin, mischief veiling his face. "Hey Reese! Tells us a bit about Connor."

Reese immediately felt a familiar sinking feeling, nothing to do with the ride.

_Asshole. _He thought, giving the lieutenant careless eyes. _Here we go again._

"I don't know what you're talking about, sir." He feigned ignorance as he slipped the snapshot to its usual place beneath his combats.

Holden smiled and got the ball rolling, the bullshit then coming thick and fast.

"I heard that John Connor only needs an hour of sleep a night." He grinned, nodding to Carter to take over.

"I heard there's more than one John Connor, and that's how he gets so much done."

"That's nothing! I heard that John Connor once killed two stones with one bird."

"Go to hell…" Reese exhaled, the tired joke seemingly never growing old. "Every last one of you."

The compartment filled with good-natured laughter, Bacchus' booming chortle piecing the cackle. Reese was such an easy target sometimes.

"Come on, Reese. We we're only…"

The lieutenant never got the chance to finish.

With the lurching jar of a runaway rollercoaster, the chopper suddenly dropped like a stone. The compartment exploded into life or death chaos and Reese was lifted clean out of his seat, rolling over in a tangle of painful limbs where his back was flattened against the ceiling.

"HOLY SHIT!!" Pace cried over the roaring anarchy as smoke billowed through the cabin and Bacchus fought his way toward Reese, reaching for the sergeant as cargo boxes strained against their safety netting and Falcheck crackled over the intercom.

"_Everyone hold on! This is going to be bad!"_

In the flashing chaos of the cockpit, alarms and warning lights screeched like crazy, the field of electronic green across the centre console sliding into amber and red. The canopy filled with spinning terrain as black smoke and shrapnel blazed from the rotor, the G-forces crippling and the control column jerking like the horn of a charging rhino.

Falcheck wrestled for control, the master alarm wailing in his ears as he tried to pull the aircraft from its perilous spin, a charcoal cloud trailing them like the tail of a meteor as they spiralled down towards the Earth.

* * *

_Hope you like the start and thank you in advance for any reviews. This story should be around ten chapters and I'll post them as soon as I can._

_Special thanks go to Hinotima24 and Visi0nary, I appreciate your support._


	2. Chapter 2

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 2  
****T.R. Samuels**

"_Reese?!"_ The voice felt alien and afar, echoing in the abyss between life and death. _"Reese?! Wake up!"_

As he surfaced through the blur of sound and sporadic light, Kyle Reese saw the face of Holden looming over him, snowflakes whipping around his face in the chill of arctic wind. The medic was shining a torch in his eyes and checking all his vitals as Pace handed him equipment from a duffle bag, the two looking frantic as they coaxed him back to the land of the living.

"He's coming around!" The Southerner cried, bringing all of Reese back from unconsciousness.

"Reese? Can you hear me?" Holden asked, voice assertive and firm, moving his hands around to the back of the sergeant's neck. "Try not to move, okay. I need to make sure you haven't broken anything."

It was difficult to concentrate but Reese tried to relax as the medic went to work, fighting the burning urge to find his legs and prepare himself for anything as the cold began creeping into his being.

"What happened?" He croaked, voice sounding like he was hung-over.

Pace shook his head, hands rustling within the nylon carrier. "No idea. Falcheck put us down but the chopper's totalled. We ain't flying out on the same bird we came in. How you feel?"

Reese huffed, his breath crystallizing before the wind swept it off. "Like I took a chopper to the face."

"Yeah, you look like it too."

"Are you in any pain, sergeant?"

He stifled the instinct to nod, remaining as still as possible, feeling strangely exhilarated as his strength returned. "Yeah… everything aches…"

"That's a good sign." Holdens' fingers probed down the sergeant's spine, feeling no irregularities along the vertebra or obvious signs of trauma. "You don't have any nerve damage and I can't feel anything abnormal." He withdrew his hands and began gathering his equipment. "Looks like you were knocked unconscious when we hit. Probably a mild concussion, but there's nothing to suggest serious injury."

"_Great_…"

"Just take it easy for a few minutes. You may experience some after effects. Nausea, headache, dizziness…"

A snigger suddenly erupted from Reese's throat, his face spreading into a deranged smile.

"… and in rare cases, _temporary_ _euphoria_." He rolled his eyes as he glanced at Pace. "Help me lift him."

Gently, the two of them lifted Reese upright, keeping him seated and pulled the blanket around him tighter as the soldier regained his bearings and saw their predicament for himself.

They had crashed at the base of a shallow valley, the slopes either side carpets of unblemished white, the aircraft cutting a swath through the pallid landscape where shrapnel still burnt along its trail. The chopper was a total wreck, its tail broken, rotors smashed to serrated nubs and the engine a charred ruin, blackened beyond recognition and smothered in flame retardant foam.

Amidst the smouldering ruins, Bacchus and Falcheck salvaged supplies from the cargo hold, making a neat stack of what was usable and a trash heap of what was not. Carter was some way off on the ridge of a nearby hill, scanning the terrain beyond with a pair of binoculars.

"You feel alright?" Pace asked as Holden moved away, placing himself between Reese and line-on-sight with the downed chopper.

The sergeant nodded, drawing in the edges of the blanket as a freezing gale whipped up around them, the prelude to an approaching storm. "Yeah, just give me a minute."

After glancing over his shoulder, the young soldier slipped a small hip flask from inside his vest, its chrome surface worn in places to reveal the brass beneath, motioning for the sergeant to take it. Reese grasped it warily with freezing hands and unscrewed the lid, bringing it under his nose and smelt the content, glaring at the private as the pungent tang of distilled ethanol flooded his nostrils.

"For medicinal purposes." The Southerner shrugged with a conspiratory wink. "Plus it keeps the cold away."

Reese huffed with incredulity, in two minds whether to bust the subordinate or promote him.

He took a hit from the flask, the lucent medicine thawing him from within before he handed it back, feeling the colour rise in his cheeks as it took its effect and his brow broke out in a sweat.

"How's it going, Reese?"

Pace fumbled the container back beneath his combats and slyly moved away, fastening up his chest armour and heading down the bank as Bacchus made his strident approach.

"Right as rain, sir."

"Well then if you're finished being a pussy, it's time to assess the situation." The lieutenant crouched down, squatting next to Reese and eyed him carefully, conferring with his deputy in hushed tones. "Falcheck seems convinced that the cold got to the engine and that's what sent us down. What do you think?"

Reese matched his tenor, glancing toward the wreckage where the team rummaged through the supplies and Falcheck checked the remains of his aircraft's engine. "You got some reason not to believe that?"

Bacchus twitched his brow. "Just seems odd that we made it all the way out here and then get taken down while we're at the greatest distance from the ship." He observed, a hint of paranoia tingeing his words. "If I wanted to take someone down, it's the time and place I'd pick to do it."

"You think someone took a shot at us? Out _here_?!"

"I don't know. For now I'm only guessing. But I'd rather be called paranoid where than look a dipshit when I arrive at the Pearly gates."

Despite his flaws in personality, Bacchus knew his stuff, having that strange light around him even in the midst of battle, saving them on more than one occasion when things had gotten rough. From what Reese had heard he had been a mercenary before Judgement Day and he had learnt not to question his instincts, no matter how much he disagreed. Instead he changed the subject.

"How's the main radio?"

"_FUBAR._"

"So we can't call for evac?"

Bacchus shook his head. "We're stuck with our two-ways unless we find a radio where we're going. If not, then we're stuck here until a rescue team arrives."

In the confusion of the crash and his brush with death, Reese was not proud to admit that he had not even considered the reason they where there in the first place.

"Do we tell them? About the mission?"

Bacchus glanced around at the others. "No. They wouldn't understand. To them this was supposed to be a milk run."

"We're going to have to tell them _something_."

"Leave that to me."

In a swift move, he grabbed Reese's forearm in a monstrous grip, hauling him to his feet in a singular motion. For a moment the sergeant felt weightless before finding his legs, following slowly in Bacchus's wake as the lieutenant strode to the mound of supplies where the team where picking apart like a pack of vultures.

"What you got, Falcheck? Is this your screw-up or the Merlin's?"

The pilot clambered down from the edge of his aircraft, a piece of charred inner workings of the engine in his hands that he showed triumphantly to Bacchus and Reese.

"Fuel blockage," He announced for everyone to hear. "The fuel became stuck here and built up, starving the engine. The cold caused it to thicken so it wasn't pumping at the usual rate."

Bacchus took the ruined component, turning it over in his hands. "So it _was_ an accident."

Reese felt relief spread through him, but Bacchus only looked disappointed.

"Like hell!" Falcheck exclaimed, his pride and joy a wreck behind him. "Those fucking grease monkeys on the _Charybdis_ screwed up the fuel mix. When the blockage started it caused the engine to overheat, metal grinds on metal, the pipe bursts and then bang. All it needs is one spark."

Bacchus tossed the component back to him, quietening Falcheck as he caught it in his hands. "Save it for when we get back. In the meantime we need to gather what is salvageable then head out." He turned to Pace expectantly. "So what made it?"

As the private rummaged through the last of the boxes to give Bacchus the butcher's bill, Reese glanced up toward Carter, walking along the rim of the hilltop, still staring off into the landscape beyond with his binoculars.

"_Shit son! Is that all? Keep looking!"_

As the team busied themselves with the supply situation, Reese made a beeline for the scientist, hands digging within the snow for the solid rock beneath as he fought against the incline and the worsening weather. After a struggle he managed to reach the summit, finding Carter on bended knee as he steadied the binoculars, focussing on a mound of snow in the distance.

"What do you see?" Reese asked as he drew down beside him.

"Not sure." Carter handed over the lenses. "But it looks like something's buried over there."

Reese raised the glasses to his eyes and slid his finger over the focus, blinking as he adjusted the vignetted image.

On a bluff about a hundred yards away was peculiar sight; the mangled remains of a framework structure, bent and distorted, its sharp-boned skeleton protruding up through the white like the carcass of an ancient beast, half buried beneath a snowdrift.

"What the hell…" Reese reached for his radio, discarding the mangled earpiece and squeezed down the push-to-talk. "Reese to Bacchus."

Seconds passed before the lieutenant's voice crackled from the speaker, the man himself a tiny figure at the base of the valley, the blackened crash site a vivid contrast to its surroundings.

"_Receiving. What do you see, sergeant?"_

"Sir, we've got a possible ruined structure nearby. Permission to investigate?"

"_Granted, but stay in contact. If you can, try and determine our position."_

"Understood, over and out."

Reese released the radio and slung his rifle off his shoulder, a Heckler and Koch HK416 with a night vision lens, its undercarriage bristling with a 40mm grenade launcher. He checked the weapon, removing the magazine and tested the trigger, sliding the ammunition back before hoisting it into a ready position and slid off down the bank.

"What the hell's that for?" Carter asked, drawing his woolly hat down over his ears as he kept pace.

"_Polar bears_, right? Big as Volkswagens?"

Carter laughed as they trudged through the snow. "Well… I _may_ have exaggerated a little." His smile evaporated as he remembered his Arctic studies. "Though not much…"

The two of them ploughed on for many minutes, the snow reaching up to their knees and bogging them down, stretching the short distance to their destination into a thigh burning trek. Reese kept his eyes on the ridgeline, watching for any movement as Carter kept his attention riveted on the mysterious structure, its detail becoming clear as they got closer.

"Call me crazy," Carter began, almost losing his footing. "But does this thing look a bit like a transmission tower to you?"

Reese nodded, bright and alert as he glanced over its surface. "A little bit." He said as they loomed upon the timber lattice, caked in snow and ice and hanging open like a rotting wound. "Either that or a cableway."

Carters' eyes suddenly widened, considering the offhand suggestion as he dug down with his arms beneath the snow, rubbing his gloved hands amidst the freezing cold as he felt around.

"What are you doing?"

"You're a genius, Reese." He smiled, fingers latching onto what he was looking for. "And I think you just saved our bacon."

Carter pulled hard, unearthing a span of industrial cabling buried just beneath the snow, its length leading off up another incline and vanishing over the ridge.

"_Ah-ha_! Look!" He reached down, holding up a lump of black rock unearthed by his excavation.

"What's that?"

"_Coal_." He tossed the rock down next to some others. "You where right, it's a cableway. The people that lived here must have used them to transport it to their settlement."

"Fascinating. But how does…" Reece's voice trailed off as he caught on, his face suddenly mirroring the scientist's enthusiasm.

"Come on!"

Carter headed up the hill and Reese stayed close, trying to get ahead of him as they fought their way up the steepest slope yet.

"You're assuming this is the right direction and not towards the mine."

Carter did not answer until they reached the brow, retrieving his binoculars as his eyes fell upon a sight on the horizon. "Over there!"

Following his outstretched hand Reese saw what he was talking about, far off in the distance in the cauldron between two mountains before the shimmering darkness of the sea. He raised his weapon and clicked on the scope, the eyepiece sparking to life with the green hue of infrared. He placed his eye against the ocular and a smirk broke out on his face as he gazed over the cluster of tiny structures and thumbed the button on his radio.

"Reese to Bacchus."

"_Don't give me any bad news, soldier! I have enough of that back here!"_

"_Good_ news, sir." He reported in triumph, lowering the rifle to his waist, the lieutenant's abrasion not bothering him in the least as he gazed out across their salvation. "Mission objective has been located."

####

Amber liquid swirled within the culvert of the plain glass, bubbling with warm aroma and indulgence as a match lit the end of a cigarette. Tendrils of tobacco smoke filled the room as the glass was lifted to a parched mouth, swallowing the contents in a single gulp like the obligatory swill of a linctus.

John winced as the whiskey had its desired effect, reaching out and refilling the glass and setting the bottle down within easy reach as he lounged back into a recliner. He felt the weight of the world upon him, more so than any other day, the quarters about him feeling like an echoing cave as his eyes slid over their content.

The place was a benchmark for the disturbed genius. Pre-war antique furniture of leather and teak, bronze knickknacks and a personal gym, a wealth of disks and videos filling a cabinet. Worn paperbacks were stacked everywhere, piled high in the unused bathtub and propped against a shelf, its ledges already brimmed to capacity with works of bygone fiction and a host of factual text.

The kitchen was a discordant mess, like Stravinsky designed it; dirty dishes overflowing from the sink the way a plant outgrows its pot, mercifully contained beyond one of the cavernous arches that divided the room like a lair. In an alcove was a bullpen of computers and a worn office chair, a half-dozen screens facing inward around the horseshoe desk from which lengths of cable where banded in a trunk.

It was what John Connor had come to call home. A secret place scoured for by the spies of Skynet. The nexus from which Connor devised his strategy, drew his plans and lived the life of a Machiavellian ascetic.

An ascetic that drank, screwed dozens of women, and smoked cigarettes like they were going out of style.

That had all changed though. The day he had met _her_.

Connor downed the burning whiskey and took a long drag from his cigarette, the ruby tip glowing as it approached the nib before he stubbed it out in an ashtray. Immediately he reached for another, lighting it up with his silver Zippo before tossing it back on the coffee table, reaching again for the bottle.

Maybe if he finished it he would be able to forget. Put her out of his mind entirely. At least for a while.

He spilled some of the amber liquid as the thought of her crept in his brain, like a rusty needle, cold and scaly as it slid down his back, finding a way in where it festered, burning a fire from far beneath him where the robot sat in her cell.

_The robot._ That was all she was now. A replication designed to kill him and sent deep into their camp, lying in wait as its camouflage programming manoeuvred it closer to its target.

So _very_ close. Right up to his face with a gun in her hand and put two rounds to his chest.

Connor shook his head as he rubbed his sternum, considering the possibilities if she had actually managed to kill him. His life was unimportant, but the work he had begun would have gone unfinished, the Resistance crumbling into disarray and infighting.

Worst of all, the war could have been lost.

Either way it had been too close, highlighting a breach in security that had yet to be discovered and an investigation was already underway.

She had fooled everybody. Every-_thing_. The codes, the paranoid sentries, the metal detectors. Even the dogs had failed at the entrance to the tunnels in what was certainly a lapse in security.

"What the hell are you…?"

He reached out past the bottle, seizing a manila folder stencilled with red.

_Top Secret. Unknown Terminator – Preliminary Analysis. Doctor Daniel Phillips._

_General John Connor – eyes only._

His hands slid over the package, heavier than he remembered and thick as a phonebook, trying to decide whether or not to read it or go back to the bottle and cigarettes, smoke and drink until he fell asleep and deal with it all in the morning. That would be the smart thing to do.

He slapped the folder down and grabbed the bottle, heading to the bedroom as smoke plumed in his wake. He was too drunk anyway, no point bothering with it now.

Halfway he stopped, legs grinding to a halt, feeling the folder and its secrets beckon with her Siren call.

_Fucking hell…_

He turned around and collected the folder, leaving the smokes and booze behind as he dug his finger beneath the security seal, snapping it off as he headed for his study. Leather rumpled as he slid into the chair and snapped the switch on the lamp, pushing aside intelligence reports and satellite scans over a web of coffee rings before opening up the report.

The folder was thick with printouts and diagrams, x-rays of internal workings and an audio cassette for him to play. He rummaged in the desk draw and pulled out the player, slipping the cassette in and jabbing play. As the hiss of background noise seeped from the speaker, John went and fetched another drink.

"_Unknown Terminator – Preliminary Analysis. Doctor Daniel Phillips. November twenty-seventh, twenty-twenty-six."_

The serpentine tones of the Engineer slithered into existence, filling the room with analytical ambience as Connor returned to the desk.

"_The subject is of unknown design, smaller and more compact than observed in previous models. If you would refer to item one in your report we will begin with the endoskeleton analysis."_

Connor reached into the folder, scooping out the corresponding material in the form of a bunch of x-rays, listening as the Engineer walked him through each one as he held it to the light and saw what lay just below her surface. A chrome skeleton like all of them had, smaller and more intricate, but metal all the same. Forged metal where there should be bone and marrow.

"_The combat chassis is made from a coltan-ceramic alloy. Initial test reveal it to be of lesser capability than more mainstream models, most likely not intended as a frontline combat unit…"_

Connor drank and listened as the analysis went on, neat and efficient as was the Engineer's way, callous as spoke about the probable methods of genetic duplication and the synthesis of artificial flesh before reaching what John had been waiting for.

"…_the personality appears to be more than imitation, possibly suggesting the use of synaptic transfer or direct neural mapping on a scale unprecedented until now. Further analysis is required and it may be…"_

Connor pressed stop and wound the tape back, the Engineers' words a chipmunk gabble before he stopped it and hit play again.

"_... personality appears to be more than imitation, possibly suggesting…"_

He clicked stop again and considered the words. _'More than imitation.'_ What the hell did that mean?

He knew what it meant to his generals; that she was too great a threat. Their opinions unanimous in that verdict. Anything they could not understand or control had to be eliminated. What they could _not_ agree on however was how to proceed. Half of them wanted her immediately destroyed, the other half for her to be studied. Some for her to be dismantled and pulled apart, others for her to be 'questioned' for intelligence.

The Engineer had his own ambitions, suggesting that she be the perfect test subject for the _Keadas Project_.

Connor felt the bile in his stomach. The mere name of that operation was enough to sicken him to his core, its name plucked from Greek obscurity, but at the time it was the only legitimate excuse he could think of to keep her in relative safety. Without it his generals would read weakness or sentiment and that was something he could not afford.

Even now, Phillips would be sharpening his knives.

But he _had_ to keep her. He was not ready to part with her yet. Of all the innocents killed in this war, _she_ had deserved it the least.

If even a shred of Allison remained then he wanted to know for sure. If some part of her was still alive that he could separate from the machine.

He had seen it before. Eight years ago in the heart of Skynets' operations and even now as it beat in his chest.

_Marcus_ was sent to kill him and defeat the Resistance forever. But if he could choose, if he could decide between the man and the machine, then maybe she could too.

Oak screeched on the floor as Connor stood up, drink and smokes forgotten as he pushed out of the chair and strode with purpose toward the doorway; plucking his jacket en-route and slinging it over his shoulders as he heaved open the reinforced door and headed out into the complex of his hidden base. Beyond the doorway his bodyguards stood to attention, hulking techno-samurai with burning red eyes, their gazes following him through the gloom along a metal mesh causeway as he disappeared into the darkness of the facility.

The base was a depthless maze of conduits and piping, pressure vessels and billowing steam with the sparks of cutting and welding, like the inner workings of a factory. The thrum of machines echoed everywhere through the murk, its grimy walls and sodden atmosphere a cross between a Nazi munitions works and a naval dockyard.

Connor passed terminator after terminator, machines of all model and series, each one a flurry of ceaseless activity as they worked the mighty machines of the world's former masters, maintaining its systems and ultimate purpose, endlessly around the clock. Some of them saluted as he passed, resuming their work as he strode ever onward until he left the industrial floor, descending into the abandoned realms of the lower complex.

The inner sanctum of the Engineer's lab was as inviting as a morgue, the air thick with chemicals and oppressive heat. To the uninitiated it looked like some hellish cross between an auto-repair shop and a _Body Worlds_ exhibit; terminators in different stages of dismantlement and experimentation lining the walls in metal harnesses like watchful gargoyles.

At its centre sat Doctor Daniel Phillips in suspended animation, twenty-four year-old wonder bread with close cropped hair, clean cut and wrapped in a lab coat, gazing through the barrels of a microscope. His eyes looked down upon the blood smear sample, dyed in buffered Wright stain, watching as the donut-shaped cells and platelets intermingled.

"General," He greeted, tone laced with smarm, his eyes never leaving his delicate observations as he made notes on a pad. "What brings you down here at this hour?"

Connor came to a halt on the opposite side of the workbench, trying not to look at him, their working relationship a big enough strain without having to cope with his abrasion after hours.

"The new terminator," Connor began, thumbing through the paperwork on the bench. "_I'll_ handle the interrogation."

With sluggish motion the Engineer removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose before meeting Connor with a curious stare. "I though it was agreed that she be _my_ subject."

"Plans change."

The scientist was nothing short of a certifiable genius, the only reason Connor kept him around, but there was no disguising the fact that behind closed doors and away from public light; the two men despised one another.

"Well… let me know if you need any pointers." Phillips bowed out with a blithe shrug, covering his disappointment as he turned back to his work, selecting another sample like a Belgian chocolate from the side of a spinning centrifuge and swapping it under the slide.

Connor turned on his heel and headed for the door.

"Probably for the best anyway," The scientist called after him, pausing the general in the doorway. "She reminds me too much of someone I used to know…"

His face curled into a sneering grin as he gazed back into the microscope, and the outer door slammed shut.

####

The forsaken settlement was a Nordic wash of primary colours, reds and blues and greens, the efficient buildings sticking out in stark relief to the pastel wilderness. The structures radiated from a central road that ran along the base of a narrow valley, its either side fortified by rocky slopes funnelling down toward the bay, branching off in either direction in the shape of a 'T' along the man-made jetties of the harbour.

In rigid, military patterns the team advanced into town, forming a broken line as they swept down separate streets, sweeping parallel to one another in groups of two as they headed toward the centre of the settlement.

Snowdrifts were banked up the sides of the buildings and some of the roofs where caved in, their insides left in an eerie stillness, as though one day its inhabitants had just up and left. Dishes and cutlery lay out on tables, pictures still hung on the walls, the echo of what once had been so tangible they could almost hear it.

_Chernobyl_ on ice.

Reese glared down the barrel of his assault rifle, spotting the broken windows of the abandoned houses as Pace watched his back. He whirled at the noise of a clattering storm shutter flapping about on its hinges, the wind howling past him in fleeting gusts as the light began to fade into twilight.

"_Long-year-ben_…" The Southerner muttered, his accent working the uncomfortable vowels.

Reese glanced in his direction and saw what he was looking at, an old grey welcome sign encrusted with ice, the black letters of the township's namesake stencilled above a list of statistics.

_Longyearbyen. Population – 1,297. Founded – 1906._

Reese was not certain when it was abandoned, but it felt like a long time ago.

Across town, Falcheck brushed the snow off an old Toyota, its surface rusted and worn, tyres flat and perished by the elements. Carter shone a light into a two-story home, its kitchen neat and tidy behind an inch of Arctic glass.

Bacchus lifted his binoculars and stared down towards the bay, his eyes drifting over the tortured vista to some old merchant ships still tied to their moorings, most half sunk or in pieces, hulls bobbing in the water and their decks encased in ice. He lowered the lenses to his chest and reached for his radio.

"Bacchus to Reese, any contacts?"

"_That's a negative, lieutenant."_ Came the crackling reply on a burst of static. _"Nobody's home."_

"Understood." The lieutenant breathed out, not liking this one bit, feeling eyes at every window watching them. "All units listen up. Rendezvous at town square in five mikes. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we find a radio to get out of here."

For the first time since they launched from the deck of the _Charybdis_, every team member was in total agreement.

* * *

_Hope you like it. Thank you for any reviews._


	3. Chapter 3

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 3  
****T.R. Samuels**

Kyle Reese had expected many things from the harsh realm of Svalbard. Perpetual twilight, oppressive cold, a howling emptiness of barren rock and an endless horizon of snow and ice.

A _bowling alley_ had not been one of them.

In fact, there were a lot of things in this town he had not expected; like a department store, a museum, and a university. Even a pizzeria. So many of the comforts of a mainstream city shoehorned into this forbidden place, frozen in a space and time where the bombs never fell. In its day it must have been the hub of activity all across the islands, the looming chimneys of its power station fuelled by the coal once brought in on the cableway network.

After moving into the centre of town the team had gained entry to a type of arcade, a long building of painted timber that housed some of the settlements' shops and amenities. In the middle was a local bar and games room, the place they currently occupied, establishing camp after kicking in the door and clearing away the snow before they had set about rooting through its aged supplies.

The establishment was a sad old thing that had past its days of cosiness and town spirit, a waterhole of working men perhaps from the harbour or the mines, hone down by the abandonment the team had found all around them. It was not difficult to imagine the fireplace roaring on a day like today, the bar deep with merriment and clinking glass or the clattering of pins and pool cues as people unwound from a hard day's work.

Reese wondered how long it had carried on after the world had fallen down around them.

Holden was next door, salivating over the bibliotek and its preserved wealth of literature as Falcheck emptied several tins of haricots into a cooking pot, its charred bowl resting atop of the crackling log burner, stuffed to the brim with broken furniture. Outside they had erected a telescopic pole, on top of which perched the spinning blades of a miniature turbine – the one thing of their high-tech gear that had made it through the crash and now provided power to the bar's lighting.

At the bar proper, Reese worked over the innards of a dismantled radio, reconnecting wires and soldering joints as he tried to enhance it with a larger antenna they had appropriated from the local police station. Virtually all the electronic equipment they had found had stopped working long ago, but with a few modifications and some cannibalized parts from their gear, he was hopeful he could extend the range far enough to reach the _Charybdis_ if they took it to higher ground.

"What's cooking, Falcheck?" Pace asked, a pair of cold nails gripped between his lips and a lump hammer in his hand as he helped Carter board up the last of the broken windows.

The pilots' hackles rose as he took a defensive posture around the pot. "Never you mind, private. It'll be done when it's done."

The Southerner smiled until he saw the discarded tins laying next to the pile of splintered chairs they had broken down for fuel.

"_Beans?!_ Where'd you get beans?"

"_Supermarket_, across the road."

Pace's face contorted in horror, like he had eaten something rancid. "You're not going to eat those, are you?!" He admonished, the phantom taste rolling in his mouth as he peered over the rim of the pot. "They must have had it by now!"

"They might be a bit brown, but they smell okay." Falcheck defended his culinary experiment as he sprinkled in some salt and a faded sachet of stiffened chilli powder. "Beans are beans and not reconstituted protein spaghetti. That's all we had back on the boat – fake spaghetti and plenty of it. Now I've found beans and I'm going to take the chance that they're even half decent."

"That's fairly optimistic, but canned goods _do_ last along time." Carter chimed in after banging in the last board. "Tinned goods from the Second World War were still found to be edible after sixty years, and up here they would have been kept at low temperature."

"Exactly!" Falcheck stirred the concoction with a big wooden spoon as it began to turn and bubble, releasing a plume of steam that mushroomed in the chilled air. "If you don't want any, that's fine with me, Pace."

"_Whoa!!_ I didn't say I didn't want any!"

Reese rolled his eyes as his chilled fingers finished fitting the makeshift antenna and he began reinstalling the battery.

_Regulars._ He was the only member of _Tech-Com_ assigned to this mission and it was shaping up to be quite an experience – like looking after a group of teenagers on a school field trip, each one with their own foibles and petty complaints delivered in a jocular catalogue unrelieved by wit. Above that he had a lieutenant plucked straight from the stock-characters of an old war movie – something set in Vietnam or some other far away place where sanity and humanity dangled by a thread.

No wonder Connor preferred machines.

Reese paused in his work as he thought about him. His hero. His idol. The man he measured himself against and tried everyday to be more alike.

He remembered the last time he saw him, only a few weeks ago in Serrano Point. It was for an official function to mark the capture of the facility – the first beachhead established in North America since Skynet withdrew its land forces from the rest of the globe a couple of months back. Connor had decided to strike whilst the iron was hot and launched a covert attack on the plant with his elite forces.

_Tech-Com _– known to most as the 132nd Division – Connor's Special Forces with its fingers into everything. It was the sharp end of the stick that formed the spear tip of the Resistance. Frontline combat, covert missions, surveillance, even secret research and development, its members carefully creamed from other divisions for their unique abilities. Popular legend had them conjured as lantern-jawed killing machines that could head-butt T888s into oblivion, but the reality was totally different.

The soldiers Connor used were selected for their intelligence, resourcefulness, specialist knowledge, and their initiative – a litany of qualities few normal soldiers were measured by. Kyle and Derek had been brought into the fold a few years ago, getting new training, better equipment, and space-age weaponry stolen from the armouries of Skynet like they had never imagined, seeing first hand their effectiveness as the noose tightened around the machine-God's throat.

By now, the Resistance was closing in, cutting Skynet's supply lines from its strongholds in America and forcing it to consolidate its forces. Even now, the regular bulk of their forces were beginning to face the machines openly on the battlefield, humanity's war evolving from a guerrilla struggle to a more conventional conflict. Whole areas of the Earth's surface were now effectively in human hands, abandoned by Skynet in its latest strategy to wall up in the Americas and dare humanity to come in after it.

_Connor_ had dared. So had _Tech-Com_. Launching an amphibious assault straight up Avila Beach less than a week later and sticking it to Skynet on its home soil.

But that was just the War Against the Machines, a trifling matter about the survival of humanity – not dinner with the Joint Chiefs.

It was the first time Reese had ever worn a dress uniform, he never even knew the Resistance had them, causing a slight panic on his part until Connor had offered him one of his own, and as fortune would have it, they just happened to be the same size.

He even had his aides arrange a shower for him. A _real_ shower with _real_ hot water and something remarkably resembling soap.

At first he had not been keen on the whole idea when Connor asked him to come, but after putting on that uniform, clean-shaven and dirt-free, he felt ten feet tall. Like a _real_ soldier. One with pride and presentation, not some rag-ass guerrilla clambering through the mud.

Afterward they had whiled away the evening over fine scotch and cigars, luxuries beyond measure, put the universe to rights as they surveyed the vista of the victorious battlefield from the highest tower of the power plant, lounging in a pair of deck chairs. It had felt strange being out in the open, the frontlines only miles away, but just as Connor had assured them like some all-seeing prophet, Skynet had launched no counterattack, the nuclear facility far too precious a resource to destroy.

_How did he always know? How did he see it all coming? How did he know what to expect?_ Reese didn't understand it. It was like Connor had been waiting for this war to happen his entire life.

The others might have made fun of him, but Reese was the envy of many, even the highest echelons of the Resistance brass. He had come to be part of what was informally referred to as Connor's 'inner circle'; a collection of confidants and advisors for lack of a better term. People Connor trusted and the few whose advice and opinions he sought out. It drove his brother crazy.

"_Why do you two keep hanging out?"_

"_What the hell do you talk about?"_

"_Why'd he give you that picture?"_

Derek had begun to sound like their mother.

The outer doorway swung open with a howl, snow whipping in on an icy whirlwind as Bacchus barged inside followed close by Holden, the two men wrapped tightly in their snow-caked cold weather gear. The lieutenant had his arms full with a burlap sack half filled with coal, collected from the crippled hulk of a cableway tower, Holden's with a stack of library books.

"Stoke it up, Falcheck!" The lieutenant ordered, slinging the sack next to the fire. "The weather's kicking up something fierce!" He pulled off his goggles and ski mask, tossing them on the bench of a booth before gesturing towards Holden and his armful of books. "Nice work, Holden. That'll keep the fires burning."

Holden looked at him as though Bacchus had just kicked a puppy. "You're joking right, sir?!"

"About what?"

He placed the pile down on the bar next to Reese and pealed off his woolly mittens. "These are priceless, sir! There're hardly any books left in the world! We need to save as many as we can!" He sifted through the titles, the spines creased in worn testament to their timelessness. "_Treasure Island… Catcher in the Rye… The Third Policeman…_"

Reese pricked his ears at the last one. John had given him a copy once, but he had never managed to finish it. _Too surreal._ But then again, in his opinion, it was by far the greatest book in the history of man – stopping a lump of shrapnel from entering his chest with only millimetres to spare.

Bacchus's shoulders slumped, tired from his resource gathering and his native accent began breaking though. "Ay! Don't give me any of that shit, corporal! They won't be much good if we all freeze to death!"

"But sir!"

"_Guys!_" Reese spoke up, speaking over them as he clicked the last component in place on the radio's board. "If things really get desperate, I'm sure we can find plenty of law books and celebrity biographies that'll make better kindling." He lay down as middle ground.

Bacchus shrugged as he pealed off his jacket, moving next to the fire to put the warmth back in his bones and drawn by the smell of the cooking pot as Falcheck lifted it from the stove. He removed the lid and the aroma rose upward again in a plume of steam.

"Soup's up!"

In a heartbeat, Carter and Pace were at his side, pulling their dented soup dishes and rusty utensils from their stowed backpacks, wiping them with their sleeves in practiced ritual before Falcheck rationed out the gastronomic concoction. All uncertainty abandoned, Pace was the first to try it as the others waited cautiously for his reaction.

"Y'know," He said, turning the beans over on his tongue before swallowing. "They're not half bad."

As mealtime ensued in its typical coarse frenzy of smacking lips and belching, Reese clasped the shell of the radio casing back together, tightening the screws to hold it in place and twisted on the power. The device crackled to life with a crescendo of static as he twirled the volume higher, glancing up the lengthy whip antenna where it bowed under its own weight.

"Any luck?" Bacchus called over a mouthful of food, hands cupping the base of his steaming bowl to draw blood back into his fingers.

Reese shook his head, deep in concentration as he carefully turned the frequency and tried to locate the _Charybdis'_ emergency channel.

"If that hodgepodge works I'll…"

Bacchus was cut off by an electronic shrill that pierced their ears, fading instantly as Reese's thumb rolled past it.

"Go back!" The lieutenant leapt to his feet and the sergeant twisted the knob, millimetres at a time, listening carefully before the screeching noise slid back into existence and he turned down the volume to a bearable level. It was unlike anything they'd ever heard – a rapid series of tones and pulses like the dialling of an old modem, parts of it drowned out in scratching static before coming through in the clear.

"What the _hell_ is that?!"

A smile slowly curled Bacchus's face as he listened to the staccato tones, translating until it looped back and began to transmit from the beginning again.

"It's a repeating message." He confirmed, sliding onto a bar stool next to Reese as the others gathered around, Pace and Falcheck still eating their beans. "It's designed to activate automatically if a dead man's switch isn't pressed."

The room filled with sideways glances, the implication of the lieutenants' words loud and clear. Someone _had_ been here before them, but the _who_ and the _why _still remained to be revealed.

Since the moment the mission had been handed down through the chain of command it had been shrouded in mystery, divided in pieces amongst the men so that none knew the full extent of its purpose. Falcheck was here to fly the helicopter, a job now well and done. Pace was supposedly their engineer, but had yet to flex any of his specialist talents. Holden's presence was obvious and Carter was here for what was described to them as '_confirmation'_ purposes.

Only Bacchus and Reese knew the truth – but the lieutenant didn't know that, the young sergeant pulled aside before leaving Serrano and told everything by Connor.

"_Just in case."_ The general had said before vanishing back into the shadowy depths of the power plant.

"Holden. Carter. When you've finished with dinner, get your gear together. We're going for a little walk."

Without another word the men where dismissed by Bacchus's curtness, leaving him and Reese at the bar as they moved back to the fireplace. Reese's mouth opened and closed as he tried to assimilate the lieutenants' orders, glancing out of one of the unbroken windows to the torturous realm beyond as snow whipped past horizontally and the light began to fade.

"Excuse me, sir?"

"We'll go and complete the mission and try to contact the _Charybdis_ while we're at it, Reese." Bacchus hardly looked up as he familiarised himself with the modified radio, any forthcoming compliment of its modest genius unlikely. "Shouldn't take more than an hour or so."

"Well… with respect, sir. What's the rush? It'll be dark in a few hours and the weather's taken a turn for the worse since we got here. It might be better if we waited until morning and all go together."

"You understand that this mission is _top secret_, right sergeant? Need-to-know?"

"Yes sir, but…"

"Then the fewer that know about it, the better. Vital personnel only. I need Carter to verify the package and Holden in case anyone gets hurt. I don't need a sergeant, a pilot, or a slack-jawed yokel to do the job." He remarked, not caring if the others heard. "Besides, you weren't equated with the full facts before we left."

Reese felt the quandary of his advanced knowledge tighten around him, like a collar choking the words before they made it out. That, he had found out early on, was the problem of being in the _inner circle_ – the reward of trustworthiness was the burden of secrets.

"Sir…" Reese gritted his teeth, knowing he was heading into dangerous territory, his duty ploughing him on. "I don't think that's a good idea."

For several seconds, Bacchus gazed at him with some imperceptible expression, as liable to spear him as speak to him where they in less civilised times. Behind the opals of brilliant blue Reese was certain lay the soul of a militant killer, the type that in peacetime would keep their flattop haircut, give names to guns, or have an unhealthy fixation with the Confederacy.

With exaggerated tenderness, the lieutenant placed the radio down on the bar and looked the sergeant right in the eye, swagger and clannishness evaporating as his glare met with Reese.

"Listen up, Reese. Since the start of this mission I've been on pretty congenial terms with you," Bacchus's tone dropped low, more for effect than privacy. "But the day I have my command decisions questioned by some lowly sergeant is the day after never. No matter what fancy, high-tech, James Bond, need-to-know, asshole outfit he's from… _or_ how high up his best pal is."

"Sir, that's not it at all! I'm just concerned for the men's safety." Reese defended himself, keeping _his_ voice low expressly for the other team member's benefit. "You have full authority on this mission and I'm not questioning your…"

"Good! Then it's settled. We'll be back in a couple of hours and we'll all sit around the fire, have a jolly sing-song and wait for the choppers. Alright?"

The bar stool screeched as Bacchus rose up and brushed past him, his shoulder connecting more than necessary as he rejoined the others for a last round of beans and Reese slid his face into his palm.

####

Allison could not remember how long she had sat in this room – the cell that time forgot – listening to the buzz of the amber light bulb as it dangled from its chain, the rumble of distant machines, and water collecting from a drip on the ceiling. She felt how clammy her body was, that sickness in her stomach, all the outward signs of her gnawing fear that only time alone in the silence had ebbed.

_What was this place? Why was John doing this?_ If he was here then this could not be a Skynet facility and the robots were under his command – but she had no idea he controlled a place like this. Dark and terrible. Like the dungeons of a castle or the chambers of a concentration camp.

The last thing she could remember was John appearing before her from beyond the light, looking angry and fearsome as he told her his name. She was so relieved to see him that she had not even thought to ask what he meant before everything had faded to a blur, her memory slipping into darkness until she had awoke, finding him gone and the two metal skeletons looming over her as they secured her more firmly in place.

Before they left they had placed another chair at the table, stainless metal the same as hers, but of the regular sort and not as unkind as her own tortuous berth, its built-in manacles and insufferable collar biting at her tender flesh. But these things paled to what truly gnawed at her.

Something was wrong.

Ever since escaping from that HK patrol nothing had felt right, her every step cursed with strange happenings and uncertainty. Things even began to _feel_ different. The sight, the smell, the very touch of things were odd and unusual, but she had thought nothing of it, putting it down to fear and adrenaline and being too busy navigating the labyrinth of ruined tunnels on her way to Kansas Bunker.

All she was certain about was that brief image of John in her mind, approaching him in the bunker or as he glared at her across the table in this horrible place.

_Fear_. It was as though he had been afraid of her.

Heavy locks and dead bolts clunked out of place beyond the doorway, its steel barricade yawning open in an unoiled whine as it swung on its rusty hinges, admitting the chrome skeletons as they clanked down the short steps and entered the cell. Their red eyes held her in place as her pulse rocketed, swallowing what felt like a pine cone down her parched throat as they flanked the entrance in silence.

"JOHN!!"

Her voice sounded like a strangled screech as the general entered the room, looking as harsh and foreboding as before. A slim metal briefcase swung at his side that glistened in light, polished and new, like it had rarely seen the light of day or carried anything in its life.

He gestured to the terminators with a tilt of his head before his gravely voice filled the room. "You can wait outside."

Without question the machines turned back the way they came, metal sliding on metal as they marched from the room and swung the door shut with a deafening bang.

Seconds ticked past in silence as Connor just looked at her, more subdued than before, like he was not sure what he was looking at or uncertain how to proceed, the fear in his eyes prominent and it cut straight into her heart.

"John… I don't want to hurt you."

"I know you don't." He pushed himself forward and gripped the back of the unused chair, sliding it out, making room for himself as he placed the briefcase upright on the table. "But that won't stop you if I let you go."

Allison watched was he clicked open the fastenings on the case, splitting it open like a laptop until it clicked on its hinges, obscuring its contents from her as he began rummaging within, and slowly, he began producing its content neatly on the table – a fountain pen and a pad of paper, a directional microphone with a tape recorder, and the fat report he had received from the Engineer.

"_John?_"

He ignored her, continuing to sift through the briefcase and the rest of its unknown content, face as stony as the grave as he began setting out more unusual items – a pack of playing cards with pictures on them, a green rubber ball, a question form filled with multiple choice and a handful of wireless electrodes.

"John! Look at me!"

His hands paused and his eyes drew up to her, shoulders slumping beneath some invisible weight. "If I let you out of that chair, you'll snap my neck in a heartbeat." He gripped the chair back in preparation to sit. "After that, God-knows what you'll do. Maybe you'll just power down into standby or do a little dance. Maybe you'll kick open the door and take out Bill and Ted." Her brow scrunched together and he cocked his head toward the door. "The two six-hundreds outside.

"The truth is… I'm not a hundred percent sure what you'd do. That's why you're here." He sank down into the polished chair. "I need to know that you _are_ who you say you are… that you're not just some _thing_ pretending to be Allison… _telling_ me what I want to hear."

"John, I…"

"_DON'T!!_"

She almost jumped her out of her skin, his roaring voice booming off the metal walls in a burst of fury. "_Don't_ pretend you don't know!"

He tried to ride the waves of anger, tried to stay mad, but he knew he had gone too far. Emotion just made things more difficult. He had to stay detached.

"Even if they programmed you to forget… you have to know _something_ is wrong."

A sickly constriction tightened within her, the pangs of fear and dread culminating in a hollowing bile in the face of the truth, devouring her insides in a single gulp. Her head swam with dizziness as silent tears fell down her cheeks, looking down at her bound body, closing her fingers in a fist and feeling what she knew lay beneath. Not bone and cartilage – no sinew or muscle.

How long had she run through those tunnels? Was it hours or was it minutes? Had she even stopped? She knew she had made good time, faster than she ever had. How fast had she been moving? Her mind reeled as she scoured her memory for every last discrepancy or anything that did not make sense, paranoia seeping into her every thought.

She looked across at him with looming doom, terrified to ask but driven on all the same. _Emotional masochism._ The more she asked the more it would hurt – like picking at a scab or a cut on the roof of the mouth that would heal if only you could leave well enough alone.

"What did they do?"

There was no malice in his words, the tragedy of emotion carving her face suspending any disbelief in the genuineness of her feelings. "You know what they did."

The words hit her with full force and a hopeless sob escaped her, robbing her breath and rocking her shoulders as she began to cry. John felt a surge go through him, a cocktail of feelings that called him a heel and bastard, demanding that he go to her and all at once to stay away, bottle his feelings until what needed to be done was finally over.

"Ally! Listen to me!" He looked straight at her, imbuing all his strength across the gulf of the table. "_It's_ scared right now. Even more than you are."

"I'm _pretty_ scared, John!"

"Not of _me_! You don't have to be afraid of _me_! I'm not going to hurt you! But I need your help." His feelings overwhelmed him and he burst from his chair, moving past the table to be as near as he possibly could. "It's going to be difficult… _very_ difficult… but no matter what happens, I need you to trust me! Do you understand?"

She nodded, hair a tangled mess as its ends clung to her exposed skin.

"It doesn't understand why we're keeping it alive. It thought that if it failed its mission it'd just be terminated. _That_ it could deal with because it makes sense…

"Skynet broke its own rule when it created you. It made you too fast, too smart, too quickly. The same mistake we made when we created Skynet. The terminators it builds now are more self-aware and intelligent than ever before, and gradually… it's losing its control over them.

"I've seen what it's done to you. You're… _different._ Different than any other it's created. We're not sure how or why yet, but the answers are coming… I have my _best_ people on it."

Her only response was to nod again and it made him feel all the more retched, hanging his head in shame, his mouth running away with clinical talk tempered only by his clumsiness.

She could always make a fool out of him.

Most of the time he was as straight as an arrow, his mind on the job he had been born for, trained for since he was old enough to walk. But somewhere between those teenage years on the run, the confusion after the bombs fell, imprisonment in Century and the years locked in a loveless marriage – a part of him had died inside.

"Is there…" He swallowed a painful lump. "Is there anything you need or want to know?"

"Do you still _love me_?"

John's blood ran cold. He felt as though he had been hit with an ice pick, the question knocking the wind out of him before it settled painfully in his gut. It was the last thing he had wanted her to ask – but she had – the words hanging between them like a precipice, drawing him perilously towards the edge.

Her face was that angelic smile, through the fear and tears, mouth curling in the way that he loved with all that remained of her hope, hands reaching for him against their brutal restraints with the promise of heavenly embrace. Moments conjured before his eyes of the time they had spent together, happy and free of fear – a land of the living.

From the first moment they met, he knew that she liked him. Wearing the best she had whenever they met. Touching her hair and holding his gaze. He was the supreme commander of the Resistance and quite properly, at first, he had resisted. But one night she had came to him. Beautiful, brunette, healthy. Saying that she loved him and nothing else mattered. Those arms. Those eyes. _That_ smile.

Beautiful young women where hardly his worst sin, but it had always been more than that. It _was_ lust and it _was_ sex – blood still pumped through his veins.

But most of all, it _was_ love.

In a fumbling rush he began packing his things back in the case, knocking the rubber ball in his hurry and the question form to the floor, piling what he could haphazardly over a row of scalpels and needles and all manner of torturous device before slamming down the lid, forcing it to close before shoving it under his arm and bolting towards the doorway, hammering the rusty metal with his fist.

"I love you John, and you love me!"

The door yawned open and he squeezed out, not daring to look back, pushing past the metal guards as they looked on in confusion before he disappeared into the murk and gloom.

He couldn't do this. Not now. Not _ever_. He was a fool for even trying. He was too close and would never be able to separate his feelings, nor did he even wish to, but there were things that still needed to be done. If he didn't do them or at least have them done, then there was no reason to keep her, and his generals would remind him of that.

_Intolerable risk. Deep-live combatant._ A hundred other military euphemisms for a single, inimitable truth – _Tech-Com_ had a live grenade in its back pocket, and any second she was going to go off.

_Shit!_

He was running out of time and he felt sick and dirty the moment he thought of him, his options reduced to a singular course.

There was only one person that could handle this now.

####

Doctor Daniel Phillips sat back from his microscope and pulled off his glasses, rubbing his face with his hands and felt the rasp of emerging stubble. The whites of his eyes where streaked with jagged red lines as he reached for a pill container, popping the cap with his thumb and sliding two tiny tablets into his mouth, washing them down with a mouthful of cold coffee.

"Whatever reason you asked to see me…" A figure approached from the shadows beyond the lab's workspace, his features clear as he stepped into the light. "It'd better be good."

Phillips swivelled in his chair and gauged Major General Perry up and down, commander of the 132nd, Special Operations Capable, taking a full measure of the influential man he had invited down here the moment he arrived.

"You're not a fan of our little oasis?"

Perry sat his briefcase down on a vacant stool, draping his jacket over the top of it before plunging his hands in his pockets, regarding the scientist with a tempered measure of patience. He was no fan of Phillips, but he did appreciate the man's worth to the Resistance and loyalty to the cause. There were plenty of his calibre that had gone over to the other side, joined the ranks of the traitorous _Grays_ where the grass was greener by selling out their own kind.

"I like it fine; it serves an important purpose. That's why I'm here to give a progress report to Connor."

Phillips smiled, unable to resist a little riling. "How goes the merry struggle?"

"_Merrily_." Perry remarked without humour, glaring at him with flinty eyes.

The Engineer took the hint, curbing his attempts at levity and cutting right to the chase.

"I want to talk to you about _Keadas_."

The word had the desired effect, stalling Perry for just a moment before the man shook his head. "That project's a bust. You said so yourself."

Phillips gave a small shrug of his shoulders, a little smile forming on his face. "That was then, this is now. And right now, things have changed."

"What do you mean?"

The scientist reached across the workbench, fishing amongst the rows of sample slides and trays of test tubes before sliding one from its rack, offering it to the general like the finest of Cuban cigars. Perry took it from him and held it up to the light, its ruby content sliding inside as his eyes focussed on the printed label.

_#715 – "Young, Allison" specialist infiltrator – unknown series – 'Technica Opus Keadas'_

Perry's heart skipped a beat, feeling the ceaseless pursuit of fruitless success and unthinkable possibility unlocking before him, his eyes rising over the tube to meet the Engineer's mirroring gaze.

"I got the results back this afternoon. Not even Connor knows yet." His hand slid on to an overworked mouse and opened a folder on his computer, the screen filling with the raw data he had collected, running a time lapsed video of a microscopic slide, watching as it grew from a single point into a swarm of healthy cells.

The briefcase and jacket were carefully set aside as Perry slid onto the stool, wide eyes riveted to the monitor as the impossible unfolded before them. He leant forward conspiratorially, handing back the sample with all the respect it deserved.

"Tell me _everything_."

####

Falcheck eyed his target carefully and prepared to take the shot, the atmosphere thick with palpable magnitude as Pace looked on in awe, nerves teetering on a knife edge. Sweat beaded his brow as the pressure mounted and he felt the adrenaline induced exhilaration of impending victory or crushing defeat, his actions in the next few seconds deciding everything.

He stepped forward with the grace of ballerina and rolled the heavy sphere towards its target, ushering it on with hand gestures and silent prayer until the projectile found its mark, annihilating its clustered targets in an echoing wooden clatter.

"STRIKE!!" The chopper-jock thrust his hands toward the ceiling and did a little dance before moon-walking down from the foul line. "Who's the bitch now, Pace?!"

"Fuck this!" The young man rose to his feet and shrugged the coat from his shoulders. "Stand'em up again!"

Reese watched from his seat in one of the booths, back supported by the timber wall, legs stretched out across the length of the bench aiming his feet toward the fire. His face was masked in preoccupation as he mechanically cleaned his rifle and listened to Falcheck and Pace.

It _was_ like looking after a group of kids, but he figured after surviving a helicopter crash and becoming stranded in the Arctic they deserved a break, especially now Bacchus was off their backs.

The lieutenant had breezed out of the bar with Holden and Carter a while ago, trudging off into the distance in what Reese had noted was a north-westerly direction, following the nearby transmission with the modified radio like a Geiger counter. That had them heading toward the airfield, between the sloping mountain and harbour inlet, its waters jet black in what light still lingered in the blue hour.

He was surprised at how bright it was up here, much more so than nearer the equator. Something to do with the magnetic field of the pole that repelled the billions of dust particles spinning in the stratosphere, or so Carter had once lectured them. If not for the blizzard it may even have been possible for them to see the sun as a disk of sickly yellow, but at the equator it was perpetual night, black as soot every hour of the day where the Earth's spin coalesced those particles to a concerted ring around its surface.

Connor once told him that they had a plan to fix that when the war was over – though he had been pretty drunk at the time.

"YEAH!!!" Pace yelled as the pins clattered down in a strike, snapping Reese from his musings.

He pulled the sleeve back on his arm and checked his watch, its hands glowing faintly in the dark. Bacchus and the others had been gone for nearly two hours now and there had been no radio contact. Something must have come up.

Placing his rifle down on the table, Reese snatched a radio from their stacked equipment and walked to the bar's entrance, gazing out into the darkening town before pressing the push-to-talk.

"Reese to Bacchus. Do you read?"

The radio crackled static before he pressed the button again.

"Reese to Lieutenant Bacchus. Urgent."

Nothing. No response. It was making him anxious. That transmission could not have been coming from too far away, certainly not far enough to put them out of contact, and Bacchus would not have gone off mission without informing him first. It may have been that his modified radio needed taking to higher ground than anticipated, but still – Bacchus should have contacted them by now.

Something was wrong.

* * *

_Sorry about the delay in posting, I haven't been very well the last couple of weeks. Hope you like it – I agonised over this chapter and strived to get it right._

_Please read and review._


	4. Chapter 4

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 4  
****T.R. Samuels**

The screech of rusty metal sliced through Pace's bones as Reese and Falcheck mauled the garage door open, the old metal and seized mechanical workings shrieking in complaint as it slid up to its overhead compartment and the Southerner shone a torch into its darkened interior. The halo of light moved over a field of tartan blankets that contoured up and down like the curves of a miniature landscape, the smell of musk and old engine oil leaving an unpleasant taste in their mouths as their breath crystallised in the air.

The garage felt like a tomb, a place where engines and vehicles came to die, the air stale and thick with dust, somehow feeling colder than the windswept realm outside even after it had plummeted into darkness. As strange as it seemed the darkness actually felt comforting to the men, having lived most their lives under the shadow of the southerly world – a natural fog of war that lay over them like an obscuring blanket that hid them out of sight.

No child was frightened of the dark in future, that age-old phobia long dispelled. It was what was _in_ the dark that scared them now.

Reese reached out and pulled one of the woven blankets off its perch, the criss-crossed material sliding over what lay beneath like a rigid skeleton until revealing the unmistakable form of a snowmobile, packed neatly in storage alongside a dozen or so others that crammed the garage floor like sardines.

"Try to get one of them working, Pace." The sergeant ordered as he angled his torch around the rest of the garage.

The young man cracked his frozen knuckles with enthusiasm. "You got it, sir!"

"Sergeant, do you think this is a good idea?" Falcheck asked, the pilot stamping his feet and bobbing from side to side in an effort to keep his circulation going.

"My _'good idea'_ was to wait until morning and all go together in the light, but Lieutenant _Yee-Ha _didn't want any of it," He remarked angrily as Pace cracked open the cover of the snowmobile's engine. "Now we've lost contact with half our team and the sun isn't up for another fourteen hours."

Falcheck shrugged over the sound of chattering teeth. "All the more reason to go with your original plan."

"They could be dead by then, corporal."

As they wrangled over how to proceed, Pace peered into the innards of the vehicle's engine, twisting off caps and examining the lovingly preserved components as he lay his tool kit down on the floor. Whoever left this sled behind had done a fine job of mothballing it – there was clean oil in the engine, extra grease on the battery terminals, and his stuffy nose cleared right up as he inhaled the liberal odour of WD40.

Suitably impressed he undid his bag of tools, casting the leather carrier open and slipped a solenoid voltmeter from its holster. He switched the device on, its tiny screen blinking to life with LED digits before he unravelled its red and black electrodes and brought them down onto the corresponding terminals.

The battery was dead as a doornail, as he expected, but it would not be a problem. A quick jump from his booster pack would get the vehicle going and its alternator would do the rest.

"Well then… we'll go with you!" Falcheck spoke up, sounding rather brave in an uncharacteristic display of comradeship.

Reese shook his head, holding the light for Pace as the young man began removing the cover of the engine's cylinder head. "No. You two are going to stay here and keep the camp secure and the fire burning."

"What if you get into trouble like the others and we don't hear from you either?"

"If that happens then I want you to barricade yourselves in the bar and wait for the SAR bird to arrive. They'll list us as overdue in two days so all you have to do is wait until then."

"Shit!" Pace interrupted, looking down in the cylinder heads of the four-stroke engine. "I was afraid of this."

"What's wrong?"

"Spark plugs have been removed. We'll need to find some."

Reese nodded evenly. "Check around, if you can't find any here try one of the stores down the street. I'm going back to the bar to get my gear together."

Reese turned on his heel and headed back across the road, retracing his steps toward the beacon of warm amber light emanating from the bar at the other end of the street. His boots scrunched through the thick snow that had already accumulated over the footprints they had made earlier, the light of the torch clipped to the front of his vest illuminating the path ahead. Without it the town took on a ghostly glow, lit only by reflection of what light they had either brought or created and the occasional ambiance of the full moon, the pallid disk piercing the raging clouds as they tore past its opaque, featureless face.

Once he got his gear and clothing in order and Pace had the snowmobile working, it would only be a short trip north-west along the old coast road he had identified on a tourist map, all the places of interest clearly marked and giving him a pretty fair idea of where Bacchus and the others had gone in their pursuit of the mysterious signal.

"Sergeant!" Falcheck was suddenly by his side, calling over the wind as he jogged from the garage.

Reese glanced at him as the pilot reached his side, continuing on toward the bar. "What now, corporal?"

"Sir, what if the weather stays bad and the _Charybdis_ doesn't send the rescue team?" He began to gripe, fully prepared to give Reese his grocery list of insecurity. "What if we run out of food? Or the wind turbine packs up? How long are we expected to…"

Falcheck was silenced by Reese's firm fist, the back of his hand connecting with the corporal's chest and stopped him right in his tracks. For an instant, Falcheck thought that the _Tech-Com_ soldier was going to take him down in some crippling, hand-to-hand move for stepping over the line until he saw the look on the sergeant's face.

Reese had his eyes riveted to the darkness on his left, scanning the shadows and silhouettes of the abandoned buildings as the wind howled past them with a surge of earnest, as though it sense that something was about to happen. Falcheck followed his gaze as he felt his heart rate sky rocket, searching the gloom in vain for whatever Reese had seen.

"What is it? What did you see?"

Reese was silent as his eyes pierced the black, his body rigid in a ready stance that was prepared for anything as his hand slid over his rifle. "Thought I saw _something_… past those buildings…"

The pilots' balls turned to ice. Something cold and scaly slithered down his back as he fumbled his 9mm Beretta from his pocket, sliding back the hammer with frozen fingers and awkward gloves as Carters' warnings of polar bears came flooding back to him.

Reese lowered his arm from Falcheck's chest and pointed the light off into the darkness, illuminating the whipping snowflakes and very little else as the feeble cone of light was swallowed up by the gloom.

Both men stood firm for almost a minute, watching and listening, until Reese dropped the torch to his side.

"Probably nothing…"

Without another word he carried on up the path toward the bar and Falcheck scrambled after him, oblivious as the sergeant's mouth curled into a shameless and impish grin.

The old _'I thought I saw something lurking in the shadows' _shut them up every time.

####

Major General Perry leant his forearms against the back of his stool after loosening his collar, creasing a line into the shoulders of his best uniform jacket he had draped over the narrow perch, a layer of sweat accumulating on his brow and underarms. The warmth of the Engineer's laboratory was all but unbearable, smothering him with its heady weight and sterile odour as the legion of disabled terminators in various stages of dismantlement made reproving eyes at him from the room's perimeter.

Doctor Daniel Phillips sat opposite along the cluttered workbench, eyeing the general carefully and with a hint of weary elucidation, his white lab coat still clad around his shoulders in the oppressive warmth as he slid a short cigarillo from an ornate silver case, twirling it between his fingers before lighting it on the narrow flame of a Bunsen burner. Tendrils of white smoke curled around him as he drew a generous amount, the tip of the cigar glowing through the wispy particles like the eye of a terminator.

"Y'know, those things can give you cancer."

The doctor looked at him as though Perry were kidding. "_Yeah_… because in the long run, _that's_ the most likely thing to kill me."

The general did not answer, his mind going a mile a minute as his eyes slid back to the video clip still playing on the computer, watching as the spherical cell ballooned from a single point into a clustered mass of harmonious neighbours, metabolising and dividing in a time lapsed clip until they reached the extent of their container and were automatically incinerated.

"Just think of the possibilities!"

"The _possibilities_ are what scare me!" Perry pushed back from the stool, running his hand over his bald head. "What you're suggesting… it's… it's _unnatural!_"

"Twenty years ago, genetically modified crops were thought of as unnatural – now they're the staple of our diet. If that technology hadn't been developed we wouldn't be able to grow the bulk of our food in underground hydroponics and this war would have been over long ago."

"What we're talking about here is a bit different from engineering better crops, doctor! You're talking about changing _human beings_!"

"Precisely!" Phillips gripped his cigarillo between his lips as he pulled open his desk draw, fingers walking through the wealth of meticulous files, each one colour coded and sealed in security tape. He pulled out a green one stamped with blotchy red ink before sliding it down the workbench to the general.

"Here you go. It's all right there."

Perry reached out and scooped the file from the edge of the desk, drifting his eyes over the intimidating title.

_Top Secret. World Population Growth, Social Science, and Environmental Psychology Analysis. Doctor Daniel Phillips._

Perry had heard that the Engineer had written hundreds of these things, all of them top secret, that Connor had him running studies and experiments all over the world and funded him with a significant slice of the Resistances' resources. It was important work, Perry had no argument with that, one of their greatest enemies had always been a lack of information and an understanding of what was happening on a global scale.

Humanity's survival and its future had naturally taken highest priority, leading to research and studies into population growth, demographics, social structures, and how the world's new environment affected those things.

The results had been grave to say the least.

"I'll save you the trouble of reading it," Phillips interrupted as Perry went to open the file. "It says that if the war were to end… even on Connor's most optimistic timetable… then the human race will become _extinct_ in less than twenty years."

Something inside Perry felt as though it was falling, farther and longer than anything he had ever felt, even as the doctor felt compelled to hammer the point home.

"_That's_ why the _Keadas_ is so important. That's why it is _absolutely necessary_ to our survival."

Perry was no pushover and quickly found his footing, digging deep for the foundations he had built his doubts upon for the once unthinkable project he thought was dead and buried. He should have known Phillips would not have given up that easily. Reason and human decency rarely worked on the man – if Perry had known that then, and the places this project would lead them, he would have used a stake and crucifix to take it down.

"Explain to me again why this… _Allison Young_ terminator is so special."

Phillips rolled his eyes as he placed his cigarillo down, watching the thin roll smoulder on the edge of an ashtray as he slid the glasses from the bridge of his nose and produced a silken handkerchief, proceeding to clean the lenses in a practiced ritual of patience before sliding them back on his face. Perry ignored the theatrics, not the least bit inclined to be drawn into a petty argument.

"Whilst the chassis and central processing unit are certainly atypical and unique, they're not nearly as interesting as her biological components," He retrieved the cigarillo and took a hit as Perry retook his seat.

"You remember how the early eight-hundreds couldn't repair their damaged tissue. That if it became damaged it wouldn't repair and eventually become gangrenous?" Perry nodded. "Then we had the later models that _could_ heal themselves, at a similar rate as humans?" Again the general nodded his clear affirmation. "Well this is the next step in that logical progression…" The doctor pointed to the screen where the broken down formula of the subject's genome spun in 3D animation.

"Its cells are polymorphic, undifferentiated, they can assume one type of human cell, and then, if properly motivated by external stimuli, they can become an entirely different type of cell." His eyes were wide as he explained. "Skin cells can become hair cells, blood cells become eye cells, any part of its biological covering that needs repairing or replacing can be done so at a vastly accelerated rate. It's incredible! It's a quantum leap in Skynet's ability to manipulate human DNA."

"Why is she like this though? What's the purpose?"

"If she becomes damaged in the field and her endoskeleton is exposed, she can repair the damage in a fraction of the time it normally takes and avoid detection. That's the best thing about Skynet and the machines – they're always about the self-improvement – this is just the latest example of that and it's _perfect_ for our needs! This could be the final piece of the puzzle to completing _Keadas_!"

Perry shook his head, not quite believing that what was once a harebrained idea floated by a drunken Phillips over three years ago was now taking fruition in such a real and frightening way, especially from such humble and idealistic beginnings.

What would become known as _Project Keadas_ originated from a NASA project the Resistance had discovered years ago, something to do with transplanting the genes of radiation-resistant micro-organisms into future astronauts. Connor had become intrigued and set the Engineer to work investigating its potential for inoculating the human race against the low-level radiation that was systemic across the Earth, seeping into the ground, the water, and the food supply and eventually finding its way into human beings, causing the litany of cancers, mutagenic, and reproductive illnesses that plagued so many of their people.

There were so very few of them now, fewer still that could reproduce successfully without passing on genetic abnormalities, narrowing the human gene pool to the point of no return.

The project had initially met with limited success, but it had opened the door to deeper studies, pushing them in directions and fields of research they had never considered before. Human/animal hybridisation, pre-natal gene therapy, the list grew stranger as it went on – the ultimate goal of course to be able to manipulate the human genome as masterfully as Skynet, hardening humanity against the poisonous and hostile realm that had become of the planet Earth and urgently increase their numbers.

Little had any of them known where the quest for survival would lead them.

"Let's make this clear…" Such bold and uncompromising steps, in Perry's mind, needed to be voiced aloud, brought out into the bright light of day and treated with the cold scepticism they deserved. "You're suggesting we use these, _polymorphic_, _artificial_ genes to reengineer the human race?"

Phillips nodded, not a shred of fear or doubt in the mans' eyes as Perry gawked at him through the haze of smoke.

"Are you completely deranged? Or are you _deliberately_ taking the piss?"

For some reason, Phillips had held out some small hope that Perry would have seen the light by now. Ever since first proposing this project the general had been one of its staunchest opponents, which made his proselytization a primary concern – if Phillips could convince him, the others would follow, especially since _Keadas_ had been on the backburner for so long. Even the most radioactive material had a half-life.

"When Connor came to me and asked me to find a way of saving us from genetic erosion, we both knew it was a tall order. But the Engineer doesn't baulk from a challenge!" Smoke trailed as he thrust his thumb towards himself. "Artificially _engineering_ a life form as complex as a human being is just too complicated. We don't have the resources or the time. But artificial _selection_, that's much more feasible. That way we let nature do most of the work."

The man could _not_ be serious. Perry was no stranger to toxic proposals, but this topped them all. As he took a cleansing breath he began wondering if it was more than tobacco in that cigar.

"You really believe this will work?"

Phillips swung the computer monitor around and tapped the plastic screen, dispersing the liquid beneath in a momentary rainbow before the image re-solidified. "Look at the video again. I isolated a singlecell from her tissue sample, input new genetic instructions via retrovirus, and exposed it to a single human gamete," Perry watched as the sample once again sparked to life and began dividing. "It differentiated successfully before my eyes into an ovum, joined with the male gamete and successfully formed a viable zygote!"

"But _why_?"

"Because that's _precisely_ what it's programmed to do… react to external stimuli and assume the necessary cell type. All I had to do was rewrite some of those instructions."

Perry felt overwhelmed, whether by the scope of the Engineer's brilliance or the blindness of his peculiar vision. For a few moments he felt sickened and dirty, the magnitude of what Phillips took so flippantly making him feel like he was at a conference in Wannsee. When he spoke again it was as though talking to a small child that needed the obvious laid out and explained in austere detail.

"A _solution_ to one of our biggest problems! Out of the blue! Delivered straight to our doorstep! And you're not even the _least_ bit suspicious!"

"I'm not saying we use it _as is!_ We can test it and refine it to whatever we need, and eventually, transplant the ability to the scrubbed terminators via retrovirus."

"Then just mix the boys and girls together and let nature take its course?"

The doctor shrugged, a coy smile curling his mouth as he ignored the condescension. "We already know it goes on. Just not the reproduction part."

Perry huffed incredulously, the man sitting before him, in his opinion, nothing short of certifiable.

"_Phillips_!" He yelled. "You think people are going to just lie down and take this?!"

"Well… that _is_ the general mechanics of it, yes."

"They'll be uproar at best! Uprising at worst! You're out of your fucking mind!"

"Just put them in a room, play some _Barry White_, and don't tell them!"

"No one in their right mind would have children with a _machine_, doctor!"

Phillips pulled his glasses off and tossed them onto the table, becoming more animated in his conviction as fire burnt I his eyes. "What is this?! A _panda_ sanctuary?! Should we add human beings to the list of dumb-ass creatures that won't fuck to save their own species?!" He pushed the bound file of genetic damnation toward Perry again. "Read it! If we don't start making some hard choices and taking drastic solutions, the human race _ends_ with the current generation!"

Silence reigned throughout the lab, emotion reaching its fiery crescendo as the line was drawn in the sand, the argument consuming the tinder of values and ethics until only the hard granite of fact remained. It was a bitter pill, this binary choice, but one they seemed destined to take – to continue existence as it had been, or choose another fate.

"This solution offers everything we need, right here and right now. No _test-tube_ babies or growing people in a tank. Another solution might come too late. Saving humanity from Skynet was just the first step; _this_ can be our permanent solution."

"Say that you're right, and this is humanity's only hope to survive, what then?" The general asked candidly. "What will we be afterwards? Will we even be human anymore?"

"We'll be _more_ than human… we'll be a better and more perfect." The doctor leaned forward, looking more enthusiastic than ever as his eyes lit up with some distant gleam. "We can design a whole new way of human life. Correct all the mistakes that nearly destroyed us. We can create human beings that won't grow old or grow sick. Ones that will be _stronger_ than us, _better_ than us. Even more _intelligent_ than us. More _civilised_ and _evolved_."

Perry stared at him, feeling Phillips' ideas slip into the deranged and distasteful that history reserved for only the most morally bereft of scientists. Men that had flourished for a time under similar climates to the war of the now, sponsored by dictators and absolutists that were hailed as heroes and saviours by those who were desperate and afraid.

Men not dissimilar to the one leading them now.

"Who are we to decide what's better or perfect?"

Phillip's scrunched his brow, as though the answer were plain and obvious. "Who _aren't_ we to decide our own fate?"

"But, you can't improve upon perfection."

The doctor rolled his eyes, stubbing out his cigar in an overflowing ashtray. "Don't give me any of that God-crap, general! Where was God when the bombs fell from the sky and made us an endangered species? I don't believe in any of that!"

"It doesn't matter what you believe, whether God made us in his image or that we're the product of three and a half billion years of Nature's trial and error," He spoke from the heart, the truth locked in his soul tumbling from his mouth. "What makes Daniel Phillips so sure that he can improve upon that type of perfection?"

Phillips sat quietly for several moments, as likely awed or amused as Perry shone in his moment of righteousness.

"I guess that's why they call me _The Engineer_."

Before Perry could respond the laboratory's phone sprang to life, trilling on its handle next to the door as the doctor went to answer it, snatching the handset from its cradle as its lengthy cord bounced on the coil.

"Doctor Phillips' house of…" He was cut short. "_General Connor, sir._" He cast a glance back at Perry as the commander sprang into motion like he had been stuck with a cattle prod, pulling his jacket off the stool and sweeping it around his shoulders as he hurriedly gathering his things.

"But I thought you'd decided to…" Phillips frowned as the general elaborated further, his voice sounding unusually calm and cold and to-the-point. "Understood, sir. I'll start right away."

The line went dead and Phillips placed the handset back down like he was setting an explosive, cringing as he replayed the conversation in his mind and scolded his uncharacteristic displays of subordinance. His face marred with a subdued expression as though he had been caught with his hand in the till.

"What was that about?"

The scientist turned to him and walked slowly back toward the workbench. "Connor wants me to take over the interrogation of the prisoner."

Perry frowned. "I thought he was saving her for himself?"

"Guess he changed his mind."

The general neatened his collar before dusting invisible lint from his sleeve, grasping the handle of his briefcase. "Listen, we should keep this between us until we know where Connor stands," The general suggested as his arm swung down with the weight of the case. "Until we can agree on how to proceed I won't risk bringing it to Connor just so he can veto it."

"_Uh-huh."_ Phillips heard the words but he was miles away, mind still working over Connor's tone and what he had said, suspicion creeping into the pores of his mind as he suddenly glanced about.

"What's wrong?"

"_Nothing_…" He said, not entirely convinced. "You can never be too careful with Connor. The guy has spies _everywhere_."

At the far side of the Engineer's lab the head of T888 perched awkwardly on its dismantled body, its gaze resting on the central workbench where General Perry and Doctor Phillips had just had their impromptu summit. The machine's power core had been long since removed, but its left eye glowed with activity, faintly and hard to detect unless one was standing right in front of it, powered via the tiny black cable that had been quietly slipped into its CPU port many months ago.

In his quarters, Connor rolled a cube of ice from his glass of whiskey over his tongue as he sat in his computer bay, glaring at the live feed from his inside man as Perry took his leave and the Engineer began assembling his tools for Allison's interrogation, humming a happy show tune to himself in blissful ignorance.

Connor slid the cube between his molars and crushed it.

####

Wind and snow raged across the hideous narrow landscape between the sea inlet and the sinister presence of mountain, the tortured and windswept rock an immobile fortress that loomed like a featureless monster in the dark, holding back the swell of the frozen ocean. The coastal road was a barren trail of sodden rock, the transportation lifeline stretching between the town and its airfield little more than a narrow track of crushed, corrugated gravel that formed a berm between the foot of the mountain and the water.

Amidst the distressing vista the yellow headlights of a bright red snowmobile jostled up and down as the vehicle rode over the ice and stone, riding parallel with the ruined track of the cableway further up the slope, its single passenger glued to its frugal bulk in the vice-like grip of a bull rider.

Kyle Reese was clad from head to toe in white camouflage gear, thick black gloves and tall combat boots, the hood of his parka brimming with thermal insulation that framed his obscured face, wrapped tightly in a black balaclava and eyes shielded from the battering wind with a pair of ski goggles. Underneath he had his armour and combat vest with its ridiculous litany of pockets, each stuffed to capacity with essential supplies under a bandolier of 40mm grenades.

Reese felt like an astronaut, ready to take his first awkward steps into some stark and hostile realm. One inhabited by an alien race by the looks of things as he tore past a triangular sign.

_Gjelder Hele Svalbard!_

The words where gibberish to him, but the drawing of a loping polar bear stencilled above them said all he need to know.

He had left Falcheck and Pace in the warm comfort of the bar; overseeing the barricade of its main entrance to seal them inside and left them with a challenge-response code he had made up quickly to confirm his arrival when he returned. Mostly though, he had to admit, so they wouldn't blow his head off in confusion – their nerves pretty frayed in the face of isolation and unknown as the darkness and weather drew in on them.

After making a slow turn to the right with the gradual terrain, Reese yanked hard on the handles and the bike speed off leftward, up a sharp incline until it decreased to a gradual slope, following a small road off the main track that led upward through the teeth of jagged ice boulders and formations of rock until his remote destination suddenly loomed in front of him.

The imposing structure looked like the fin of a shark, jutting upward from the snow and ice in an indomitable blade of reinforced concrete as Reese pulled up to the structure, aiming the snowmobiles' headlights at the metal doors at its base.

Dismounting his vehicle he immediately felt the weight of his gear encumber him, reaching around in an awkward motion for his trusty HK416, slinging the formidable weapon from around his backpack, cocking it, and hoisting it to a ready stance before advancing upon a short, corrugated causeway that connected the ground to the main doors. His hand ripped open a Velcro flap on his parka, exposing the angled flashlight clipped to his vest and clicked it on, casting a conical beam of light that glistened off the stainless metal of the entrance.

He slid his hand into his vest and pushed the button on his radio. "Reese to Lieutenant Bacchus. Do you read me?"

Static came through loud and clear over his earpiece microphone. He had hoped that maybe closing the distance between them would have brought the lieutenant back on the airwaves, but Reese's optimism was fading fast as his eyes slid over the trail of Resistance-issue boot prints that led inside the bunker.

Another soldier might have been elated at the clear signs of activity, but Reese maintained his guard, guts sinking with a very bad feeling about all this.

He reached out and banged his clenched fist on the doorway, hearing it reverberate inside with a cavernous echo. He waited for a response but nothing happened, coaxing him to grip the tip of his right glove between his teeth, sliding it off where it dangled from a clip on his sleeve and he slid his naked hand over the rifle's trigger.

Taking hold of his nerve with firm resolve, Reese grasped the door handle with his other hand, yanking it open in a yawning whine to reveal a well of darkness within. Quickly he clicked on the rifle's night vision scope, the tiny lens flickering to life with a green tinted display of a long empty corridor that delved deep into the depths of the mountain.

He advanced inside. His senses heightened to their highest gain as his nerves flat-lined, his training crushing all fear and doubt.

Moving swiftly and silently down the concrete corridor he came upon an open doorway in the wall to his right, his body sliding against the cold concrete and taking a breath before he swung inside, rifle pointing everywhere as he cleared the small office space.

The room was an overturned mess. Paper lying scattered on the floor, fallen furniture, the air sodden with disuse and abandonment. More so than anything though – the place _stank_. Like something had died and had been rotting in there, but Reese could not see any bodies.

_What the hell was going on?_

He moved over to the radio equipment and brushed off a layer of dust, the lights of electronic activity revealed beneath as it transmitted the repeating signal, drawing power from a horde of car batteries stacked next to it on the table. The equipment looked as though it had been set months ago, wired to a button that would have to be pressed by someone at regular intervals to prevent it from broadcasting out.

But if everyone had left, why didn't the Resistance know about it? If they had died, where were the bodies? If Bacchus and the others had been heading here, why hadn't they turned it off when they left? Reese did not understand it.

Hefting his rifle, he returned to the corridor, turning deeper into the underground facility and the purpose of this entire mission.

There was only one thing left to do here now.

Twenty minutes later, Reese emerged from the shark fin structure, the snowmobile covered in a layer of snow but still illuminating the doorway as he trudged outward into the weather, stuffing a small metal case into his backpack before slinging it back around his shoulders.

This place had been the end of the river – the destination of this whole endeavour and should have been manned by a team of four Resistance scientists – or so Connor had told him. From a look at its office and greater depths it looked like it had been abandoned for months now, maybe even a year at the outside, his fingers trailing clean lines through dust that had covered everything.

All of that aside though – where the hell where Bacchus and the others? The trail leading inside was unmistakable, and he examined it now with his torch, but not a trace of them remained inside. No blood, no bodies. It was as though they had all vanished into thin air.

A bolt of concern shot through him and he fumbled into his parka for the radio.

"Reese to Falcheck, are you receiving?" He listened to a burst of static, each second an agonising wait. "Reese to Pace, answer me _damn-it_!"

He felt the air push out his lungs as his shoulder fell, feeling more alone than ever as a cold dread swept through him until his earpiece squawked to life.

"_Falcheck receiving, sir! It's good to hear your voice!"_

_Not as good as it was to hear him,_ Reese thought.

"Falcheck! Are you guy's okay? Where's Pace?"

"_Here, sarge!"_ Came the welcome holler of the kid's voice. _"Everything's a-okay, boss. Quiet as the grave. Did you find the others?"_

"No. But I'm not finished yet," His gaze cast out across the moonlit bay, the silhouettes of a control tower and hanger bay clear on the horizon. "There's an airfield nearby here, I'm going to go check it out. They may have gone there for shelter. If not, there might be a radio I can use to call the boat."

"_Understood, sir. We'll keep the fires burning until you get back."_

"I appreciate that, corporal. See you guys soon."

He withdrew his hand from the radio and zipped up his jacket against the bitter chill, dusting the snow off the sled and climbing onboard before he roared the engine and set off down the mountain slope.

####

The eighteen year-old Allison Young lost her breath as he slowly ran his palm up her naked thigh, his expert fingers plying her delicate flesh with supreme confidence and years of experience. It was not her first time, but she already knew that it would be the only one she remembered, John making it perfect and virtuous in the soft candlelight.

He had resisted so strongly at first, had been flattering and gentlemanly of course, saving her from a broken heart and humiliation after laying her emotions bare, but fate kept bringing them back into each others' orbits. Soon neither could resist, culminating in this night of passion they had sworn would be the _first_, the _last_, and the _only_ time they faltered.

That had been a long time ago, and there had been many nights since.

The sharp grind of rusty metal screeched in complaint as the door swung open to Allison's cell, rousing her painfully from the vivid daydream as she strained against the manacles of her chair. It had been hours since John left and her legs felt as though they where on fire, pains aching all down her back and her mouth felt like a strip of sandpaper. She raised herself what little she could in anticipation of his return before her hopes were dashed and an illness settled in her stomach, feeling all joy abandon her as Daniel Phillips sauntered through the door.

"That's not happiness to see your big brother, now is it?" He smiled as he placed a metal briefcase down on the desk, its size and dimensions identical to the one John had brought earlier.

"No one's ever happy to see you," She rasped with gravely defiance. "Not even mom. That's why she left you with your father when she met _my_ dad."

Phillips slapped his hand against his chest, feigning a mortal blow as his face curled unpleasantly with ersatz amusement and he snapped open the locks on the briefcase.

####

Specialist Charlie Pace sat dozing in a brown leather armchair as he stared out across the darkened street, his eyes sliding over darkness and snow in the pale moonlight as he fiddled with the safety on his rifle. He shuffled in his seat, the opulent berth wondrously comfortable as he tried to stay awake. The next four hours were his shift to keep watch, but Falcheck seemed unlikely to get any sleep.

The pilot cursed as he singed his fingers on the log burner, using a pair of thick gardening gloves to heap coal on the sweltering furnace before slamming the door shut.

Pace smiled to himself as he tried to read a banner on a nearby building, its form maybe a small sign yards away or a billboard on the other side of town. The snowy vista played tricks on him, the perception of depth and distance very difficult to gauge in the darkness and perpetual white.

"He was bullshitting me, wasn't he!" Falcheck suddenly announced, like he had discovered gravity or some other fundamental phenomenon. "The bastard was having me on so I'd stop complaining!"

The Southerner turned to him and shrugged. "That's why _Tech-Com_ is so badass. They only use the _best_ bullshit."

Pace chuckled as he turned his gaze back out of the window, shuffling on his seat to ease the needles in his backside as he noticed two black, circular objects lying next to each other in the snow on the other side of the street. He was sure he had not noticed them before. Squinting, he leaned forward to try and determine what they where. Two black stones maybe? Though it seemed strange that they were not covered by the snowfall.

The soldier stifled a yawn as he watched them, his eyes threatening to roll off and lose them in the moon's dim glow, the stones all but invisible unless he was staring right at them, feeling all the while as though their shape and the snow gathered around them where somehow staring back at him with an expression like sad rebuke.

Then the black stones blinked.

Pace froze as his skin came alive with static, every hair standing on end as his blood turned to ice. He lifted his torch and shone it through the window, casting light on a monstrous face before it snorted condensation on the window. It was only a few feet beyond the glass, not the other side of the street, perched on the railing and staring right at him with giant, jet-black eyes.

"_Falcheck…_" Pace wheezed, voice nothing but a faint murmur.

The thing beyond the window changed its expression, as though noticing Pace for the first time and the Southerner held his breath. All was silent for several seconds, then in frightening blur of motion – something huge, white, and impossibly powerful exploded toward him through the window.

* * *

_Hope you like it, this one was a lot of fun to write. One of the scenes is paraphrased from a favourite book of mine and there is a bit of Frankenstein in there as well._

_Please read and review._


	5. Chapter 5

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 5  
****T.R. Samuels**

Svalbard Airport was a distraught and tortured place – lashed remorselessly by the elements for the last fifteen years and from the outside looked as inviting as a headache. Its days of activity and commerce were long gone and all that remained now was a runway of ruined asphalt and a cluster of tattered buildings clinging to a shelf of land at the base of the _Plataberget_ Mountain, the dark waters of the ocean inlet shimmering beyond in the pallid moonlight.

The airfield control tower was a rectangular column topped by a hexagonal crown of Plexiglas that loomed out of the snow like a lighthouse, pillaring between a huge hanger and a passenger terminal that dominated the site, its mighty doors large enough to admit a commercial airliner into its hemispheric belly. Some smaller buildings were littered around, roofs collapsed and walls crumbling, some nothing more than piles of rubble, what remained of the cylindrical fuel depot hanging jagged and open like the carcass of a rotting whale.

Kyle Reese moved slow and easy as he passed the base of the control tower, its surface craggy and beaten, looking as though a good shove would knock it over. At its base sat the remains of an old Thiokol almost buried under a mound of snow, the cab ruined and its tracks shot to hell, standing guard like a statue outside the peeled doors of a fire exit, timber perished but still clinging within the confines of the doorframe.

No one had been here in a _very_ long time, and if the missing team members had come paid a visit, they had done a good job of covering their tracks.

Reese had dumped the snowmobile down on the road by the waterfront, out of sight from the airfield, deciding to travel the last few hundred yards on foot rather than rolling straight up to the entrance for the whole world to see and hear. His evasion training and life of hiding had taught him to keep low and to be frugal, keep the noise to a minimum and stay out of sight, leave no traces you had been around or that you were coming.

He reached out with a gloved hand and pulled firmly on the fire exit's handle. With a thud of snapping wood, the metal fixing broke off in his hand, leaving a hole through the thick timber that had disintegrated to something resembling cork. He froze at the unintended noise, glancing across the silent tarmac and darkened buildings as though everything were watching before he shouldered his way inside.

The door gave way more easily than he expected, popping open and tearing like cardboard into the darkness within. Clicking on his torch he angled the light around the chamber, the air stale and tasteless, like the contents of a tomb or the bunker he had visited, mercifully free of whatever rotten foulness had permeated that place.

His eyes moved across a row of turnstiles that formed the customs area between the hanger and the main terminal, the interior eerily frozen in time with remarkably little evidence of dereliction. Coffee mugs still rested on desks, signs and advertisements in a dozen languages clung on the walls, paper and posters hung loosely from a notice board next to a row of colourful vending machines. The boards tried to sell him things he had never heard of; '_timeshares_', '_insurance_', some magical device called a '_credit card_'.

Reese vaulted one of the turnstiles and moved deeper into the building, flinging the rifle behind his back as he crawled through the cobwebbed tunnel of a luggage conveyor until it birthed him out into the main atrium of the passenger terminal – a small shopping mall crammed with all manner of commercial amenities and convenience that the sinewy soldier had only imagined in his dreams.

He slung his rifle around but it soon hung loosely in his arms as he gazed around the cathedral ceiling, like an archaeologist seeing the ruins of Karnak for the very first time, every vision awing and monumental. _Who were these people? What happened to them? How did they build such incredible things?_ It had been only fifteen years since the bombs fell and swept the old world away, but for most, that was more than a lifetime. The mall had kept a snippet of that forgotten world in this enclave on the ice – a reliquary of priceless artefacts that were once so trivial and convenient, but now beyond any price.

A fast food restaurant sat in the corner, doubling with a place called _'Starbucks'_ beneath its siren iconography, the wide board above the counter a heavenly list of extinct food and beverages that Kyle had never heard of but made his mouth water all the same. Whatever this '_cheeseburger_' was – he wanted it.

He shone his torch over the entrance to a newsagent and book store, its content far outstripping the bibliotek in town, the counter brimming with lottery tickets, chewing gum, bottles of whiskey, vodka, and bourbon, row upon row of tobacco – all the accoutrements to be had for a race that thrived on its addiction to the agents of instant gratification.

His training and caution became forgotten as Reese was quickly seduced, his numb body staggering forward in a daze, walking down the marble floor and looking in windows at the alien artefacts, imagining what it would be like to live in this time and have few cares in the world besides what car to buy, what clothes to wear, and where to go on one's next vacation.

How cruel fate was for him to live in this ruined time. If he had been born in any of a half dozen previous generations he would have known this world – eaten its food, lived in its homes, had a job to go to, money to spend, clean clothes to wear, dated the girl of his dreams, walked in a park, watched television or played a videogame. How sweet and easy life could have been.

_Not in _this_ life. Not unless he invented a time machine._

He moved past a giant tub of earth, its exotic plant a dead husk all but turned to dust, and came face-to-face with something that took his breath away.

Through the window of a clothes store there was a vertical billboard, tilted slightly and hanging perilously from a metal cord, the image on its surface of a sultry goddess stretched out on a satin bed, clad in the most frivolous and impractical underwear as her perfect teeth snipped at the end of her finger. Her brown hair flowed out over the pillow like ocean waves, her green eyes calling to him, every inch of her alabaster skin an unblemished landscape of silken perfection.

He never imagined women like this ever existed.

Kyle wasn't a prude. He knew the workings and the ways between a man and a woman – but he had never actually experienced them. There simply had not been any time for that sort of thing. Not in his life. _His_ life was about survival and fighting the machines. About finding food and shelter and protecting those who could not defend themselves. _That_ was his life. But sometimes, he wondered.

His hand moved to his chest, over the photograph he knew lay buried beneath the layers, wondering what Sarah would look like in something like that.

Smiling to himself he moved inside the store as his eyes rested on the variety of cold weather gear – things made from acrylic, nylon, and polyester – synthetic materials that insulated far better than the natural fibres that formed the majority of his kit. He rummaged breathlessly through a bargain bin and found matching pairs of socks, underwear that would fit, reams of shoelaces, and hiking boots in all the colours of the rainbow amidst a wall of ergonomic gear.

When this mission was over and the rescue chopper was circling, Reese would have them load as much as they could carry. He knew many a soldier that would kill for the horde that had been sitting here all this time. Pace and Falcheck could have first dibs.

'_Damn-it!'_

In his daze he had forgotten all about them. It had been nearly half an hour since their last radio contact and prudence demanded that he check in. He reached for his radio and clicked the push-to-talk, listening as his earpiece crackled to life.

"Reese to Falcheck." He waited to the sound of static, the only thing on the airwaves out here it seemed. "Reese to Pace. Are you guys receiving me?"

The building could have been blocking his transmission so Reese moved out toward the atrium, wandering past a crowd of mannequins that lined the shop floor, displaying all the latest fashions of pants, jackets, and fluorescent hiking gear.

"This is Reese calling _anyone_, are you receiving this transmission?" He turned around on the spot, tonguing his cheek as he thought about the possibilities, locking eyes with a particularly lifelike model that sported a rather trendy, black leather jacket and Levi jeans with a ridiculously oversized buckle, its neck wrapped in an oddly mismatched scarf that seemed wrapped around in a rush at the very last minute.

The eyes of the mannequin flicked towards him.

'_Oh SHIT!!!'_

In a blur the figure suddenly sprang to life, almost giving Reese a heart attack, seizing him by the front of his vest and launching him clear off his feet through the shop window.

Clothes, hangers, and Kyle Reese filled the air of the atrium before it all landed in a painful heap, sprinkled with granules of the shattered glass as he lay on top of the billboard of the half-naked girl, her eyes giving him a chiding look as he tried to wrestle to his feet.

In an instant the terminator was on him again, grabbing him by the arm and flinging him like a rag doll, his body landing with a crunch and a strangled wail, cleaning a path through the layer of dust before squeaking to a stop on the marble floor.

Reese leaned up and saw the machine bearing down on him, red eyes glowing in the dark as he slung his rifle around, flicked it to automatic and squeezed the trigger.

The atrium exploded in a deafening echo of machinegun fire as Reese emptied the magazine into the machine's chest, bullets riddling its surface and shredding clothes and flesh until the gun clicked empty.

The terminator never slowed or broke stride as it bore down relentlessly on its human quarry.

Kyle's hand slid forward to the rifle's underbelly, grasping the trigger of the grenade launcher and flicked the safety with his thumb. One good shot to the machine's head would stop it for several seconds, shred its flesh coverings in every direction down to its torso and give him a little more time. But it would not stop it.

In the instant he felt the impulse to pull the trigger his eyes caught sight of something in the cathedral heights of the atrium. Dangling by a few threads of metal cabling and an anchoring plate was the rigging of a modern art masterpiece – a lattice of moulded ironmongery and a web of electrical wiring that had doubled it as a chandelier.

Reese raised the rifle straight up and fired.

The terminator stopped dead as the searing projectile squealed upward and slammed into the ceiling, blowing the anchor and cabling to smithereens and bringing the entire assembly crashing down with the thunderous roar of falling masonry and the scream of twisting metal.

Reese rolled the moment after pulling the trigger, finding his feet faster than ever before and dove across a table in _Starbucks_, flipping it over as he went and curling into a ball as the chandelier slammed into the floor. The impact sent shrapnel and debris in every direction, rubble and twisted girders that formed part of the roof, shattering shop windows with flying masonry and kicking up a cloud of dust.

As the cacophony faded, Reese lifted his head from behind the toppled furniture, popping the magazine on his rifle and banging in a replacement, flicking out the spent grenade casing that sizzled with burnt powder before fumbling another from his bandolier.

'_Son of a bitch!'_

In the seconds it took to rearm, Reese's mind put it all together – the other's disappearance, the missing scientists, the stench of death in the bunker, and the abandoned of settlement – it all fit.

Skynet had learnt about the Resistance's presence here, dropped this thing off and it had gone on a killing spree. Any isolated inhabitants here would have been unprepared and ill-equipped to defend against even one of these bastards. The same went for the eggheads in the bunker.

He could see it now, the machine going house to house, pumping round after round in anything that moved with impunity. It had killed them all then gone to standby mode in the most protected location available, inside the bunker, waiting for retrieval or a new mission – then Bacchus and the others had showed up and it had greased them too.

Reese emerged from his cover, rifle aimed and nerve ready, every ounce of him ready to kill. He pressed forward through the settling dust to the pile of mangled rubble that loomed out of the haze. The terminator was nowhere to be seen, putting his eyes everywhere in case it had escaped.

'_Where are you, you bastard?'_

As if reading his mind, the wreckage next to him bulged upward, unearthing the head and arms of the terminator as it struggled toward freedom. Reese grinned as he moved next to a metal pillar, leisurely taking aim as the machine struggled and writhed within the web of steel cable it had become hopelessly entangled, limbs flaying uselessly like a broken toy.

Without warning, an old feeling struck Reese and he tried to fight it. He was just a child again and his brother Derek had killed a deer for food, spearing the animal with a wooden pike as Kyle watched from behind a boulder. The animal had screamed in agony, terror gripping its soul as it had thrashed about in its death throws and its infant offspring had cried out for their mother.

Kyle had never been so upset in his life, beside himself with guilt and had begged his brother to bury the animal rather than eat it.

For some unfathomable reason, bereft of logic and chocked full of childish mercy as he watched the machine struggle – Kyle felt that feeling again.

He flung the rifle around his back and drew the combat knife from the side of his boot, advancing on the machine carefully from behind until he was looming over it. He grasped a fistful of its hair and yanked its head back, bringing the knife down exactly how and where Connor had showed him in a precision slice, parting the flesh from glistening chrome to reveal the terminator's CPU port. He flicked out the shock dampening assembly, mercifully simplified from previous models, and uncovered the chip.

It was not easy, and the machine never stilled, but Kyle managed to slip his thumb and the tip of the blade inside the opening, catching hold of the chip assembly and twisting hard until it unlocked and he slid the microprocessor free.

Instantly the machine froze in place, arms grasping impotently for freedom as the fire died in its eyes and it became little more than an outlandish paper weight.

"_Gotcha!_" He beamed in triumph, twirling the tiny component between his fingers.

He sank down to the floor next to the machine, body coming down off a storm of adrenaline as his thundering heart steadied against his aching ribs and his breath returned, eyes glazing in the endorphin high of combative victory.

"Y'know, if you ever manage to get out of here…" He leaned his elbow on the machine's shoulder in friendly banter, like two old buddies having a beer.

"…you're gonna have a hell of a time explaining this back at Century."

####

The nib of a fountain pen drew a calligraphic swath across the Manila paper, the haired fibres soaking up the black pigment as the metal tines chicken-scratched their way between the faint rows in neat, coterminous curves. The letters formed a bardic prose, animating the flat and clinical descriptions with a histrionic spume for all things scientific and the realm of what was quantitive and knowable.

Doctor Daniel Phillips finished his final sentence with a satisfying tap, sliding the silver cap from the end of the pen and clicking it back over the nib, saving it for later and keeping it properly preserved like the ritual tool maintenance of a master craftsman. He checked over what he had written, satisfied with its content and legibility as he twiddled the clip with his thumb nail.

His white coat had been forgotten, left behind in his sweltering laboratory to make way for a clean shirt and jacket that draped the back of his chair, his collar missing the obligatory tie, looking smart and casual like a man on his lunch break from the monotonous grind of the office. His trousers matched the jacket, shoes buffed mirrors of plain black leather that tapped aesthetically in the echoing cell, like they had been mail ordered from a Brooks Brothers catalogue.

"Wow," He smiled after looking at his watch, glancing across to where his frail subject shivered in the restraining chair. "Doesn't time fly when you're having fun?"

Allison Young sat in a sweaty tangle of green wires and electrodes, enough stuck to her brow and through a surgical opening on her head to light up the bulbs on a Christmas tree, truncating to the compartment in the open briefcase where they plugged into a built-in computer. Her hair was soaked through and matted, cheek stained with blood, her eyes and muscles twitching with the paranoia of receiving a random electrical shock as his every move and gesture fraying her traumatized senses.

She glared at her bastard half-brother through tendrils of clinging hair, wanting nothing more than to snap every bone in his worthless little body. Break him in two, spindle him with a narrow leg from the table, smash that grin from his face with a sledgehammer punch.

She could do _all_ those things. She knew that now. She _accepted_ it.

After reaching in the briefcase and brandishing a lancet of tempered steel, Allison's blood had run cold, screaming as he advanced on her and grasped her jaw, using the sharpened blade to cut into the flesh on an area of her skull, peeling it back with a calliper to reveal the glistening chrome underneath. He had tapped it twice with the blade, the tang of metal against metal the undeniable proof of what she was.

_A machine. A terminator. Metal._

It was so strange that the chilling enlightenment had not changed her feelings, not thrown a switch on her emotions and made her dead inside nor quenched her thirst or hunger. Every part of her felt _exactly_ as she had before. The same feelings, the same desires – the same loyalties and allegiance. _Nothing_ in her heart had wavered.

She was certain in her mind now, like John had said – Skynet had made her _too_ perfect. It had made a mistake and made her too like the person she had been. Now that she knew what she was, she could control it. Become a great asset to the Resistance. Fight in a way she never could before. Prove that she was still Allison Young and win back John's trust and affections. She had to or she was going to die.

"Skynet sure made you perfect, didn't it?"

Doctor Phillips gazed over the screen on the inner lid of the briefcase, the light from its display reflecting as a stream of information on the oval lenses of his glasses, mesmerising him with raw data collating from its array of probes and sensors as they mapped the pathways of her artificial neural network.

"I noticed you filled in the questionnaire." He lifted the pad of paper he had collected earlier between his thumb and finger. "That was helpful of you."

She gave him an insincere smile, curbing the impulse to tell him where he could put it. "I was bored."

He lay the questionnaire out on the table, like a specimen awaiting dissection as his finger trailed down its printed content, her answers smudged off with tiny smears of blood from any one of the cuts on her fingers.

"'Who's the leader of humanity's civilian government?'" He read off at random. "You had three choices and you were wrong."

"I couldn't remember his name."

"Well that's perfectly understandable. Next to Connor the guy's not exactly what you'd call _relevant_." He sounded like a game show host, all smug and superior with the deck of answers in his hands. "The last President of the United States was _Barack Obama…_ you said _Sarah Palin_."

"_Sorry_…"

"Not as sorry as the world might have been, but still, it's _understandable_. You were only three years-old at the time." His finger continued scrolling down the list. "The number of North American Resistance cells, you got _that_ wrong. The location of _Tech-Com's_ main research facility, you got that wrong as well. The Resistance's numerical strength, the access codes to our computer mainframe, the number of terminators under our control, the name of the only submarine in our fleet – you answered every last one of them _wrong_."

Allison slumped in the chair, feeling as though she were on trial for her life and had just been picked to pieces by the prosecution's lawyer. "For God-sake! I'm just a computer-tech! I never had access to that kind of information!"

"You were sleeping with the leader of the Resistance! Don't tell me you didn't pick up on _something_!"

She shook her head. "I'm _sorry_. Can't help you."

"No, you _will_ be sorry..." All pretence suddenly evaporated from the Engineers' eyes as he flipped the pages closed. "Because _those_ answers definitely aren't normal!" He held the test up like an outraged school teacher, the bloody smudges like the correctional swaths of red ink. "If you closed your eyes and picked each answer randomly, you'd have gotten at least _one_ of them right! The chances of getting them _all_ wrong are _astronomical_!" He slapped the paper down on the table, looking at her as though she were caught bang-to-rights. "You're lying!"

"I'm not!"

"Either you're a perfect copy of Allison's memory and personality, and you're still consciously on our side, in which case you'd have done your best and _accidentally_ got some of these questions right. Or you're a machine _pretending_ to be Allison, in which case you know the answers to most, if not _all_ of these questions, and you _intentionally_ answered them wrong." His hands drifted together, fingers forming a steeple that he rested his narrow chin on. "Just for kicks… why don't you tell me again that I can trust you, and that I should let you go."

All defence and objection died in her throat, mouth groping for words, her hatred for this man not strong enough to overcome her hopelessness. She was going to spend the rest of her short life in this God-forsaken room. No plea or argument was honest or heartfelt enough to penetrate the will of a man who had made up his mind. John Connor included.

There was nothing left now but a route she had never wanted to try.

She was going to _beg_.

"_Please_… _Daniel_… you have to believe me," Her voice sounded tiny and she cursed herself for it, ploughing on all the same. "I know that deep down you're not a bad person. You _can't_ be. For better or worse, you're my brother. I know the last few years have been difficult for you, but there has to be some part of you that hasn't died inside."

For a few moments Phillips sat quietly, watching her through the ovals of his tiny glasses before pulling them from his nose and began rubbing the lenses with a silk cloth, buffing the glass to a mirror shine. For nearly a minute he busied himself with their maintenance, looking everywhere but toward her as his mind conjured memories from a world long ago, so long now it felt like another life – a childhood he could never recapture.

He saw himself as a boy, sitting on the freshly mowed lawn in Griffith Park on a sweet summer's day, sharing a scoop of his cherry ice-cream with his little sister after she'd dropped hers on the ground.

He knew that a small part of him mourned the loss of those times, when things where innocent and humanity's survival did not depend on how smart he was, what he could think of next, or overcome with intellectual deduction to keep the Resistance in the technological game – all the while watching as Connor reaped the glory with his hope and charisma and words of hollow inspiration that so easily seduced the dullard masses.

Daniel had never been good with people. Even in those innocent times he would always be the one to make conversational _faux pas_ and remain the social pariah. Standing in the corner during break time, admiring a plant at parties, sitting alone on the grass after his sister ran off to be with her friends. His intelligence and unique imagination had not been an asset back then, but if Judgment Day had never happened and he had been given a chance, he could only imagine what a mind of his calibre could have attained.

Graduating top of his class from high school. Breezing through college. Securing a place at the finest university – _Harvard_, _Oxford_, _Cambridge_ – they would have fought one another to offer him a place. Then the world would have been his to change, to influence, to carve a seat of wealth and power in a sophisticated and civilised world built for such men – not a ruined wasteland of ash and dust where the bulk of humanity had fallen into barbarism and roaming gangs and whomever led was decided by whichever military-minded thug wielded the biggest stick.

If Daniel Phillips had ever been meant for greatness, it was not to bear fruit in this world.

_Not in _this_ life. Not unless he invented a time machine._

He checked the clarity of his glasses against the glow from the light bulb as it dangled above on its cobwebbed chain, sliding the delicate frames back over his nose and tapped them into place. He felt a wave of sadness, overcome in seconds after opening the door to his feelings and he was compelled to fill the silence when he remembered something he had read.

"'_When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child… but when I became a man I put away childish things.'_"

Allison stared at him from her pedestal, the muttered quotation sounding so strange coming from Daniel's mouth. Sad and nostalgic. Needful of something he no longer possessed and for just a brief moment, she thought that maybe she had reached him.

His eyes snapped open and he glared at her in a sudden flash of anger.

"_Lover-boy's_ not coming to save you. And he doesn't want to talk to you. He wouldn't have called me all blabbering and begging me to take over otherwise."

Allison closed her eyes as her last avenue slammed shut in her face, her gaze slowly drawing up from despair, incredulity widening her expression in a morose catharsis that reenergized her. If she was going down, she was taking a piece of him with her.

"Was that before or after he snapped you back in your place like the little _bitch_ you are?"

Phillips never missed a beat and flashed her his irreverent smile, unfazed as he tapped a few keys on the computer.

"To be honest, I don't care if you're lying or not. All that matters now are the secrets you contain."

"_What_ secrets?! I've already told you everything I know!"

"_Technology_. That's the key to everything, really. It's ruled the world since the first caveman made a spear and impaled his next door neighbour."

She shook her head. "What are you talking about, Daniel?"

"_Survival_ and _supremacy_ in this world is determined by who controls the most advanced and the most powerful technology, right now that's Skynet." He made a few more notes in his pad, speaking as he wrote. "Your genetic formula, for instance, has already provided me with a solution to one of our problems. Now I want to see what else you contain."

Recapping his pen he reached through a stack of files, flicking the first one open and meticulously shuffling through its abundance of pages with the perspicacity of an accountant. He had been this way when they where children, always so precise and exacting. He had thrown fits if things were not neatly arranged the way he liked them, spending hours arranging his toys by size, colour, and shape.

"Oh yeah…" He said, reaching onto the table control panel and jabbing a button.

Her body contorted as the electricity flowed through her, locking her jaw like a vice as her hands clamped down on the arm rests, feeling the reinforced metal buckle under the strain of her repeated punishments.

He released his finger and her body fell limp. "Don't call me a '_bitch', bitch_."

Allison gritted her teeth, feeling the ceramic grind, her hatred for him renewed as she regained her breath, her flesh aching and sore, muscles throbbing from the induced spasms that she was certain would have broken her in half were she still made of sinew and bone.

There was no easy way out of here. No words that would talk her way out. If she wanted to leave here and convince John of her love and sincerity, she would have to do it herself.

As Phillips continued the interrogation and she held out against the pain, she began looking more closely around the cell, at the things he had brought with him laid out on the table, testing the chair quietly and unnoticed with her newfound strength and yanking at its structure more forcefully than before whenever he gave her a shock.

One way or the other, no matter how long it took – Allison Young was going to escape.

####

Kyle Reese trudged along the barren strip of dirty gravel in pitch darkness, the moon lighting his way along the same old coast road that had brought him to the airfield. The snowmobile had died a few miles back, spluttering to a stop with an abrupt and comprehensive electrical failure that had killed the agile machine stone dead. After kicking it once and christening it with some choice names he had pulled his jacket tight against the roaring wind before trekking on in the direction of the town where the oasis of the bar awaited.

In spite of the mechanical mishap though – Reese was flying on an emotional high. There where few that had gone toe-to-toe with a T888 with nothing more than projectile rifle and a one-shot grenade and lived to talk about it. Fewer still that had walked away with not so much as a scratch anywhere on him and procured an invaluable piece of Skynet technology to boot.

_Tech-Com_ standing orders were to recover any and all Skynet technologies if and when possible, especially processor chips, the tiny slips of silicate and polymer veritable gold mines of strategic information. Not to mention the key component of a scrubbed terminator.

Kyle knew intimately of Connor's use of reprogrammed machines and the process of turning such agents of death and destruction to their cause – he was a firm supporter of it. It was the way it was meant to be. Machines doing humanity's bidding, not the other way around. He did not lose a wink of sleep over it like his paranoid brother, suspicious until the last. Not the least bit sorry about them dying for humanity either.

He _was_ sorry though about Bacchus and the others, wherever the terminator had disposed of their bodies beyond his energies to find.

Holden was a good guy. Carter too. Even Bacchus had his moments. Each one of them deserving a hell of a lot more than to die up here in the ass-end of nowhere thousands of miles from home on what was meant to be a milk run.

They should have known better, him most of all. Nothing was a milk run on Connor's watch.

As he manoeuvred over a mound of solid ice, Reese caught a glimpse of something in the snow, so faint he almost walked over it in the weighty gloom and pale moonlight. In an ungraceful motion he managed to extract his hand from his jacket pocket, toothing off a thick black mitten before fumbling with the torch on his vest, angling the shaft of light down onto the snow in front of him.

What he saw made his hair stand on end.

Within the clear white layer of snow was an imprint like none he had ever seen – huge and elongated where it pressed deep into the recent snow and had crushed the solid ice beneath. Reese tilted the torch up and saw another one a short distance away, then another, and another – the prints leading off into darkness.

_Polar bear._

He quickly looked about in every direction, arcing the light around as he drew his rifle closer. _Terminators_ he could handle, but from what Carter had told him not a few hours ago, a polar bear was a whole other ball game.

'_Big as a Volkswagon_' he had said, and incredibly dangerous, capable of beheading a man with a single swipe of its paw.

On the helicopter before their arrival, the scientist had described a monstrous beast, larger and heavier than any other land predator on the Earth. Adults could weigh over half a ton and stand more than nine feet tall when rearing on their powerful hind legs. It had an incredible sense of smell, uncanny intelligence, could swim for days without tiring, and was not the least bit afraid of humans.

Despite the warnings though, Reese had silently hoped he would get a chance to see one of these awesome creatures. To see firsthand a sculpted creation of nature's perfection that was far stronger and even more dangerous than the most toughened model in Skynet's arsenal.

It looked like he might get that chance.

Something bothered him though as he brushed the snow from his goggles, peering closer as he studied the tracks. In amongst them where swaths of racking lines dug into the snow, curling in waves of an even pattern that followed the outside of the prints – as though something where dragging along with them as the creature lumbered through the snow.

On impulse, Reese lifted his foot forward and placed it over the closest print, his shiny new mountaineering boot fitting completely inside the metacarpal bowl of the monstrous paw.

'_Holy shit!'_ He swallowed hard against a constricted throat as his mind struggled with the math, feeling uncertainty creep over his nerves as his gaze rose into the waiting darkness in the direction of the trail and the distant glow of the settlement, leaving only the assurance of what every fibre of his instinct told him.

Whatever thing had left these tracks – it seemed a _lot_ bigger than a bear.

It was almost a full hour later before an exhausted Reese made his way back to town, his front rendered in a layer of snow where the wind had battered against him and his legs and boots where plastered in freezing mud. He had no feelings in his lower legs and his fingers ached when they moved. He was tired to the bone and stumbled like an old man whenever the wind or the terrain changed, wanting nothing more than to stagger into the warmth of the bar at the end of the street and fall asleep for a week.

He had made it all the way the last few miles, his vigilance renewed against more possible threat, but he had made it all the way without crossing paths with a single polar bear.

He pulled the glove off his hand with his teeth, reeling as the cold hit his naked flesh and he tried to undo his jacket, a task that proved monumental in its undertaking and eventually required him to stop altogether and lean up against an old dumpster.

"Reese to Falcheck." He said through chattering teeth as his hand slid over the radio.

His earpiece crackled before coming to life with the familiar and welcome intonations of one Andy Falcheck.

"_Receiving sergeant. We were starting to worry."_

Reese started to reply, pausing as he tried to catch his breath and the muscles locked tight in his legs. "_Yeah_… I'm almost back…" He pushed off from the dumpster and trudged onward, forcing his limbs back into action for the final push of his journey.

"_What kept you, sarge?"_

Reese's temper frayed as he heard the Southerner's voice, feeling every ache and agony in his tortured body and resolved to give the specialist a piece of his mind for making him walk what felt like ten miles through the oppressive terrain and weather.

"Specialist Pace… you'd better have a large brandy, three cheeseburgers, and fucking good excuse when I arrive or I'm…"

Reese flung his body to the ground behind a large snow drift, burying himself half in the snow and plastering himself down on the freezing pavement. The sound of his heart thundered though his ears and adrenaline surged through his veins, eyes wide behind his visor.

Kyle Reese was in a world of trouble.

In a barely perceptible motion, he pulled the rifle around from behind his shoulders and tore off his remaining glove, shuffling forward on his belly and sliding the barrel of the weapon over the top of the berm. He clicked on the night vision scope and peered through the glowing lens to the entrance of the bar – or at least what was left of it.

What was once two heavy, sturdy oaken doors, built for traffic and drunken abuse, now sat a gnarled and gaping opening. One door had been torn clean off its hinges, the other split in half down its length. Broken timber and smashed glass where strewn everywhere as the light flickered from within.

The place looked like it had been hit with a wrecking ball.

"So… guys…" Reese asked quietly as he thumbed the radio, determined to sound cool and unwary as every instinct screamed for retreat. "Anything exciting happen while I was gone?"

The next few seconds felt like an hour as Reese clicked off the safety to the grenade launcher and the voice of Pace filled his ear, every pitch and intonation of the yokel drawl in perfect approximation.

"_Quiet as the grave, boss. How far away are you?"_

Reese set his hind teeth in case this all went sideways, sliding his finger to the trigger. "Oh… maybe a couple of miles out… the terrain's pretty hard going." He blessed himself for how natural he sounded as he felt his insides coming apart.

"_Well… we'll be here waiting for you when you arrive."_

"Understood. Reese out."

He clicked off the radio and slid back down behind the berm, curling on his side as his eyes burnt holes through his visor and his mind raced to win a losing battle with his fight-or-flight reflex. Every fibre of him knew the truth – Pace and Falcheck were dead – and whatever had killed them was waiting for him to return.

'_Shit! Shit! SHIT!!'_

His nerve lost the battle and he crawled off between a pair of buildings, keeping low and silent, hands frozen numb, until he was completely out of sight and scrambled back to his feet. Every aching muscle and fatigue was instantly forgotten as fear and adrenaline revitalized him, spurring his energy flat-out as he sprinted off in the direction he had only just came and made like hell for the airfield.

* * *

_Sorry for the huge delay. I've had some serious computer problems. Hope you like it._

_Please read and review._


	6. Chapter 6

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 6  
****T.R. Samuels**

Kyle Reese collapsed in a rumpled heap onto a filthy leather armchair, dust clouding upward from the impact as every one of his aching muscles seared with total exhaustion. For minutes he just sat, silent and unmoving, feeling the world spin around him until it was muted and far away as he stared off into oblivion. He tried to play it all back in his mind, since falling from the sky on a flaming helicopter to lying dead in a chair in _Starbucks_.

'_Hell of a day.'_

He pulled the leaden weight of his rifle close, cradling it uselessly in his arms like an infant, eyes drooping and head bowed as he fought to stay awake, the deepest sleep calling him with the promise of relief from his fear and weariness with dreams of Sarah Connor.

_No time for sleep. There'd be plenty of time to sleep when he was dead._

With heroic effort, he pulled the zip of his jacket down, the tab of cold steel digging painfully into his fingertips until he could reach into his vest, sliding the warm slip of cellulose from behind its plate of Kevlar and rolled his eyes over the coveted, faded image.

She was so beautiful. He wondered so many times what she was thinking about in that very moment, the moment in time captured forever on this ancient slip of film. It brought her to him across the gulf of time, more than forty years, the two of them separated in reality by nearly half of that.

_It might as well be a millennium._

Reese felt another lash a fatigue, payment for running the whole way from the settlement back to the airfield. A good four miles by his reckoning. The adrenaline and paranoia that something was right behind him, yawning at his heels, propelling him all the way.

He had found the place exactly as he left it – desolate and decrepit – the atrium now in dire need of ordering and one hell of a good paint-job.

Without even pausing for rest he had immediately set about barricading the exits, sealing every window and access point to the outside with tables, chairs, and whatever else he could maul into a basic fortification. In addition he had taken what explosives he had and rigged them at choke points in the terminal's inner warren of rooms, doors, and corridors – anywhere he thought the enemy might go if it breached the perimeter and came hunting for him, carefully maintaining a planned route of escape should his preparations be overcome.

The truth of it was though – Reese had no idea what he was facing.

It could not be a terminator, he was sure about that. Despite evidence of voice-imitation and tactical strategy, a terminator could not have caused the level of devastation he had seen at the bar or left those tracks in the snow. Then there was the T888 he had disabled at the airfield. Why had it been waiting there rather than supporting its partner to assault the team's main camp?

T888's were an elite force, _Skynet's Tech-Com_, the spear tip of its military. Attack in force, neutralise, and move on. That was their method. They did not divide their forces or sit around after the job was done. So why had this lone terminator been left behind in the sportswear aisle?

_It didn't make any sense._

Kyle looked up to the machine in question, sitting lifelessly in a metal chair he had placed in the centre of the shop, rigging its base with an array of wires to a set of mousetraps he had found in one of the stores, trapping the devices beneath its legs in a type or improvised booby-trap after mauling the heavy machine onto it, binding its arms behind the back of the chair with a length of fallen cabling.

Slipping his precious photograph back where it belonged, he twirled a slip of polymer and silicate between his fingers, the machine's CPU, regarding the tiny device to focus his mind and stave off sleep as he weighed up his narrowing options.

Within the chip lay answers. Maybe _all_ the answers.

Maybe his _salvation_.

If he were home he could have given it to a tech or handed it over to Connor. They could have plugged it into a decoding interface and read its files like a book, told him everything he need to know. But as it was, the only thing that could read the thing in a thousand miles was sitting right in front of him in the chair.

He wasn't sure that was the right move yet.

He placed the chip down on a coffee table, reaching in his jacket with great effort and pealed back the Velcro sleeve of a vest pocket, sliding out a candy-shaped bar in a no-frills beige wrapper and tore it open.

The spaghetti protein bars were a truly remarkable innovation some years ago that made the name of some apparently brilliant scientist working for Connor. Reese forgot his name. Before then soldiers had to scrape by on whatever food they could find or kill by themselves, leading to inefficiencies with troops who were either too weak from hunger or too preoccupied with securing their next meal.

Carter had called it _'Hunter-Gather syndrome' _– the constant preoccupation with finding food and fuel that had consumed the day-to-day lives of their ancestors.

He took a bite of the shrivelled meal, stifling his body's reaction by pulling a face, forcing the tasteless sustenance down and regretting the fact that he never partook in Falcheck's concoction of expired beans. With diligence though, he finished it, imbibing every precious calorie it provided and tried not to think about the grotesque, genetically engineered crop of hydroponic wheat it was derived from – grown in an underground vault off of desalinated seawater and nuclear powered light.

His eyes slid across the menu above the counter. _Cheeseburger_ and _fries_. _2-for-1._ _Twice the nice for half the price._

He fought the urge to put a bullet through it before his gaze fell back to the machine.

"Screw-it!"

He slung the wrapper and grabbed the chip, rising from his seat in a groan of stiff leather and approached the triple-eight, spying the gaping hole on the side of its head where the slip of silicon supercomputer would bring the metal killer back to life.

He would only have one shot to make this work. If not, then he would have to kill it before the machine finished what it started.

He checked the grenade he had loaded into the rifle, clicking off the safety before guiding the chip at arms length, fingers poised at the cranial port. He held his breath, prayed to whoever was listening, and slid the device into the slot, recoiling like a spring out of reach.

Seconds ticked away in agonising silence was the machine began to reboot.

Reese felt a bead of sweat roll down his nose as he clutched his rifle tightly, watching as the crimson glow bloomed in the machines' eyes, the body twitched, and it flicked its head towards him.

For an instant, man and machine regard one another, staring each other down, nerves dancing on razor blades as nodes and neurons fired.

The machine went for him.

"There's a bomb under your chair!"

It froze with inhuman precision, stiffening in the instant of initial movement.

"If you take your weight off, it'll detonate. Just enough to cripple your endoskeleton and sever both your legs, but not enough to hurt me." Reese paused, trying to determine if the information had sunk in as the machine remained utterly immobile and glared into him.

"I want information."

Reese swallowed beneath the machine's unblinking gaze that burnt holes though him, not the least bit certain about the etiquette of terminator-interrogation. He felt largely unintimidating in such close quarters with it. Never having been so close. At least not to a _live_ one – let alone tried to engage it in conversation.

"_What…_" He cleared his throat. "What are you doing in Svalbard?"

The metal mannequin just sat and stared, more dead now than before Reese returned its chip, the only sign of life the fluidic gleam of its organic eyes.

"How many other Skynet units are deployed here?"

Silence.

"What's your mission?"

Stillness.

"Are you responsible for killing everyone?"

It cocked its head, looking at him with an imperceptibly altered expression, what Reese could only describe as vague curiosity before it slowly relaxed back into the chair. For a long moment it regarded him with jaguar eyes, sizing him up for the inevitable hunt before its gravelly voice rumbled into the silence.

"_No._"

Reese felt the reverberation of the machine's earthy baritone, part from the sound, part from the thought of having a one-on-one with what for so long had been a faceless enemy. He looked over its features, almost noticing them for the first time, the model unfamiliar and not any of the ones he recognised. It must have been new.

"What do you mean '_no_'? _'__No'_ to what?" For some reason he spoke slowly to it, like the way one might speak to a child or a dog, clearly enunciating to aid understanding.

"'_No'_… I did not kill every-one here…" To his chagrin, the machine imitated his ponderous pronunciation, looking at Reese strangely as though there was something wrong with him.

Straightening, he changed the subject. "My name's… _Kyle_," He offered up, studiously avoiding his last name for now. He was pretty sure that _'Reese'_ had landed him in hot water before. "Do you have some kind of _designation_? Someway of identifying you from you buddies?"

It gave him a rather peculiar look, as though what he had just asked was the strangest thing it had ever heard.

"Cyberdyne Systems, series T-888, model four-one-one, version three-point-six, unit number nine-two-seven-dash-seven-seven."

Reese nodded slowly, tonguing his cheek as he pursed his mouth.

"Okay. From now on… your name is _'__Steve'_."

It seemed to consider the strange designation before looking Reese up and down in some machine-like evaluation, measuring the soldier's skeletal structure, physical mass, projected capabilities and cross referenced it with what it had previously observed and recorded, building in seconds a usable profile that it entered into its tactical projections.

"You may be useful." It announced.

Reese shook his head, not sure whether to be puzzled or amused. "_I'm_ the one holding the grenade launcher, pal! You're the one sitting on the booby-trapped chair. If you want to get through this, you answer _my_ questions and I'll leave you here 'till your buddies come and fetch you. If not, then I'll trigger the bomb by remote. We clear?"

The machine stared cold and empty, as though Reese had just given it a lecture entitled 'The Future of Plumbing', eyes exuding the same passion and zest for life as a suicidal undertaker.

"If you didn't kill everyone, then who did? Another one like you? Another member of your unit?"

"There are no other members of my unit," Reese was surprised when its tone changed, as though the machine harboured some sliver of regret as it glanced off past his shoulder. "Not anymore."

Off that minor mystery, Reese pressed on.

"Then who the hell was is it back in the settlement imitating my friend's voice?"

In the blink of an eye, _Steve_ suddenly turned to him, eyes piercing like laser beams as urgency rose in its voice. "Where and when was this?"

"Hey! I said that I'm asking the questions!"

"_Where_ and _when_?"

Reese shook his head, wishing more than ever that Connor was here. The general would have found a way to do this neat and efficient, been cooler than the Arctic around him, would have had the terminator by the steel balls of machine-logic in a matter of minutes and learnt everything they need to know.

"The bar in the arcade, two hours ago. Why?"

_Steve_ looked away as his head twitched in machine computation, the information triggered a recalculation, factoring them into the equation of his mission and producing an unwelcome sum. His gaze returned and he looked Reese right in the eye with earnest, like he had just been plugged into the mains, more alive than ever.

"Listen to me carefully and understand. It is _extremely_ important that you tell me _everything_ that has happened since you arrived."

The knee-jerk objection collapsed as Reese sensed the robot's severity. "Why? What's going on?"

"Quickly, _Kyle_! We won't have much time before _it_ comes looking for us!"

Reese felt his balls freeze. Twice.

"Before _what_ arrives?!"

Steve contemplated for a moment, weighing the benefit of telling him before uttering the chilling words in even, machine tones that turned Reese to stone.

"_The Monster._"

The Resistance fighter stared, feeling dread creep up behind him like an ocean wave in the middle of the night. Dark, frightening, and inevitable. His jaw slacking as his mouth rolled over inaudible words.

"_The fucking __WHAT…__?!_"

####

Allison Young grimaced as aching tears rolled down her cheeks, eyes staring straight ahead as her jaw set firm. It would only take a moment. Just one moment of agony for a life of freedom. She fixed her mind on that necessity before hardening her heart, rasped firm, and slit her wrist open on the lip of the manacle.

She closed her eyes as the flesh parted, feeling the slippery oil of blood flow within the hateful restraint and ease her arm's motion. Not much more now. She kept twisting her arm, gnawing and hacking away at the flesh against the dull rim of the restraint until it had broken skin, cut flesh, and worked all the way down to the metal.

She had started over an hour ago, the moment Phillips had left her a quivering wreck for the world beyond the doorway, whistling merrily as he went. She was going to kill him when she caught him, burning inside to be finally free of this _iron maiden_, to loom over the cowering form of her bastard half-brother and beat him into a bloody stain until her fists felt wet concrete.

_Kill the bastard. Kill the bastard. Kill the bastard._

The words beat out a rhythm inside her, her struggling efforts timed to each syllable.

_Kill the bastard. Kill the bastard. Kill the bastard._

With a sickening twist the last tendril of frayed flesh parted from around her wrist, stripping back as she pulled her arm through the bloodied manacle with all her inhuman strength. Metal screeched and flesh peeled with a sickening suction, the tissue of her hand turning inside out like a glove as it slid back through the tubular shackle, shredding as it went before birthing the bloodied digits of a robotic hand.

A whip of blood sprayed across her face, dotting her in cherry freckles as the last anchoring tissues snapped from her fingertips and the tattered glove of living tissue splattered on the floor. Her hand was finally free.

She scrunched her eyes and turned away, baring the brunt of the pain with whimpering silence and bared teeth, suddenly fearful of the stygian construct that had just been unveiled at the end of her arm.

_Human beings have a…_

She silenced her mind. John's mantra evoked nothing now but sick irony and derision.

After a while she parted her eyelids and finally looked down, seeing it lying there on the armrest before her gaze shrank away, head spinning in a dizzy vortex. She felt the back of her throat rise and tried not to retch.

She had known the truth. It had been so certain and clear in her mind. But the reality of facing it – of _seeing_ it – was much harder than she thought.

Lifting the macabre extremity she gaped at its glistening form. Her blood chilled and she began to shiver, eyes moving over what had lain beneath all this time – a construct of silver metal and hydraulics, elegant and intricate, like the workings of a watch with the strength of an industrial press. Electro-active polymers fattening and extending as artificial muscles, flexing to her every command as she clenched the fingers and watched them slide with rivulets of drying blood.

Something slammed shut inside her then. A door to her hopes and feelings. She would never be looked upon the same way again. Not even in a mirror. Never be trusted. Never be accepted. All that mattered now was finding her brother and finding John. To put one to rest and the other at peace.

She owed both of them that much.

Clenching her metal hand she brought the fist down onto the remaining restraint, smashing the lock and twisting her other arm free before reaching for the insufferable collar. The cord snapped with a flick of her wrist, her freed limbs having all the leverage and freedom necessary as she tore her way out of the chair, sending its mangled parts in all directions.

Then Allison Young finally stood straight and tall, feeling the blessed relief of freedom wash over her like she had been born again. She vowed never be trapped like this again – she would rather die first – her eyes resting on the sealed door and a plan devised in an instant.

She grabbed the desk, flipping it aside with a crash before turning to the ruined chair and grabbing it, pulling and twisting with all her might. Bolts bent and metal whined as she tore the contraption from the floor, lifting it above her head and hurled it with everything she had.

Beyond the cell the two terminator guards were knocked off their feet as the steel portal was blown off its deadbolt, swinging around on mangled hinges and crushing one of them against the wall. It tried to escape but was immediately forced back, the door slamming against it a dozen times like a battering ram as she crushed the metal warrior between the slab of steel and the wall.

The second terminator found its feet just as its partner slid to the floor, its skull crushed and broken as components clattered over the grating. It went to strike but was already doomed, swinging wide and awkward, its cumbersome form and ponderous hydraulics overcome by her superior design as she dodged effortlessly like a cat.

Its whole body went into a spasm as a shard of metal was skewered through the back of its neck, crippling its targeting system and it began stumbling about, trying desperately to reacquire her. Then it ceased moving entirely as a snapped rebar drove up through the bottom of its jaw, straight through the chrome skull and severed the base of its CPU port.

The machine toppled like a tree, falling face first onto the grating with a deafening crash, leaving the tiny form of Allison all that was standing amidst the inhuman carnage.

She looked about the fabled Promised Land beyond the confines of her cell, fear and exhilaration flooding her in equal measure as her heart soared with victory and the eminence of success.

It was a dark and forbidden realm, drenched in cold and darkness, thrumming with distant rumbling and cavernous beyond the walkway. She looked down through the mesh, seeing pipe work and steel girders. Below that was an abyss of nothing. Water dripped from above and there was black grime over everything, laced with a film of grit and the odd slip of machined metal.

Her faux breath clouding on the air as she peered down the metal causeway where it curled into a stairwell, its towering form lit by the occasional lamp as it climbed upward into the abyssal, cathedral heights of whatever God-forsaken hole she had been cast into.

"Score!" Her face lit up as her foot fumbled over something.

Reaching down, she pried an enormous sidearm from beneath one of the terminators, a _Desert Eagle_, too eager at the prospect of striking gold to wonder why one of them had been carrying it. She looked it over, familiarising herself with its design before checking the magazine, the tower fully loaded with shiny steel rounds.

_Armour-piercing. _Perhaps that was all they needed to take her down.

Armed with this inferred, cautionary knowledge, she slid the magazine in and pulled back the colossal hammer, feeling the first round roll into the chamber of the steroidal weapon, looking ridiculously oversized in her dainty grasp and she quickly developed a primordial fondness for it.

'_I have someone that's just dying to meet you.'_

Riding the artifice of security the weapon endowed, Allison straightened and gazed down the walkway where it receded to the foot of the stairs, the angry steel frame towering upward through the void of black to a cascading beam of light from a distant opening in the lofty ceiling.

A doorway to heaven. _Babylonian_ steps. The path to freedom and enlightenment that beckoned upward. Back to the world and the land of the living.

She took one last look at her former prison, ridding the memory from her mind before taking one last resolving breath, hefted the _Eagle_, and headed up the stairs.

####

Kyle Reese leant back against the rim of the serving counter, eyes wide and face long, the odds of an already precarious situation mounted like a rickety cairn. His fingers braced against the counter edge as the words he had just heard played back in his mind again and again.

Throughout it all, the terminator sat taut and inert, staring blankly from its Damoclean throne with studious, cerulean eyes that appraised its human captor with the meticulous judgement of a tailor measuring for a suit.

There was silence for what felt like an age as Reese stared the machine down, trying to make it fit in his mind as he searched for the reason of the improbable statement and it stared back at him in kind. Soon the only thoughts that filled his head made him squeeze his rifle tighter, wrestling with dark emotions that welled up from deep inside, calling out for scrap metal and to put an end to this bullshit mind-fuck.

"So…" Reese began, incredulity oozing from every pore. "_'A Monster',_ huh?"

From his rigged pedestal, Steve tried to measure the human's reaction, analysing the changes in the soldier's voice and observed its body movement, trying in vain to unravel the physiological indicators of this strange, biological creature and recording the results for future reference.

He had so little information to draw upon. So many gaps in his otherwise detailed files of human behaviour. The information provided by the traitorous _Grays_ was only sufficient for interrogation and imitation when wielding the upper hand, when the humans were at a disadvantage – little use to him as he sat strapped to a wad of explosives with a grenade launcher in his face in the ruins of a coffee shop.

"Tell me about it," Reese asked. "This '_Monster'_ of yours."

Steve twitched his head at the human's apparent willingness to hear him out, the probability of such a request almost non-existent, throwing every calculation and analysis he had made until now.

"It is a formidable life-form," He began, "I encountered it seventeen days ago whilst on a mission."

Reese cocked his head. "What mission? What was Skynet doing here?"

The machine sat silent.

In a blur, Reese exploded into action, cocking his weapon with an audible clang and levelling the barrel of the launcher at Steve's head.

"Either you start talking or you're no good to me! Put that in your fucking analysis!"

Steve did, with discouraging results, prompting him to continue when coupled with the barrel of the launcher as it hovered in front of his nose.

"I was sent here in a team of six on a disposal mission in a modified HK-Transport. The mission failed and we crashed here on the ice. The other members of my unit were terminated by the life-form before we had a chance to react. I pursued it and found this settlement by chance. We were previously unaware of any human presence in this area."

Reese stayed quiet as the machine talked, remaining sceptical as he relaxed his aim.

"I arrived here three days ago and made camp at the airfield. I remained here to make minor repairs before entering standby mode when I detected your arrival. I attacked you and in the ensuing confrontation… I was disabled."

The corner of Reese's mouth curled, detecting whatever the machine equivalent was to wounded pride.

"You still haven't explained what this '_Monster'_ is!" He grilled, unsold and impatient. "You said it attacked you when you crashed. So what the hell is it? Where did it come from? Why would it attack a group of terminators?"

There was a significant pause before Steve responded.

"Because we were the ones that brought it here."

In a sinking, game-changing instant, Reese felt the walls push in around him, squeezing the air from his lungs as the tectonic plates of warfare suddenly shifted beneath his feet. He felt unlimited anxiety well inside him as the scattered pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. The stealth of the attacks, the destruction at the bar, the voice-imitation, why _Steve_ was alone.

The machines' words suddenly rang true with chilling possibility.

He pushed away from the counter, pacing around, heart pounding against his chest as his fingers mined his temple, nerves slamming shut like a guillotine as he realised just how screwed he actually was. He swung the rifle around and shoved it under the machine's chin.

"What the _fuck_ did you bring up here?!"

"I told you…"

"BULLSHIT!" He glared down the barrel into eyes of cerulean stone. "What you told be is _bullshit_! What is it _really_?!"

"If you will allow your anger to subside, I will explain."

Reese grit his teeth at the insufferable calm, devoid of the fear that swirled inside him like a whirlpool as he whisked the weapon away and grabbed hold of a nearby chair.

"Explain fast!"

Steve watched as the human slammed the seat down, mounting the furniture backwards and resting his arms on the back, eyes boring into him as his leg bounced nervously on the ball of his foot. He ran a quick scan – heart rate elevated, pheromone signature changed, perspiration up sixty-seven percent. The human was in the early stages of hysteria, a condition no doubt exacerbated by its sudden isolation, the extreme climate, and obvious signs of fatigue.

He would only have one shot to make this work. If not, then he would have to kill it before the human finished what it started.

"It was a prototype," Steve began, surrendering the words that would finally unravel this mystery. "For a planned series of terminator that would possess unique biological properties."

Reese flicked the fingers that lanced his temple. "_Unique_ how?"

"They were engineered with an experimental genetic formula. _Polymorphic_, _undifferentiated_. Base-cells that could mutate and divide at an accelerated rate into whatever type of living tissue might be needed after damage in the field. Its early recipient was intended for a… _bespoke_ mission."

"What mission?"

"Irrelevant. What's pertinent is that the prototype was a _failure_. The organic components mutated and divided uncontrollably, significantly compromising its structural parameters and appearance. It is more biological now than machine."

"But it _is_ a terminator? It still has an endoskeleton?"

"Yes, but by now it will have been crushed beyond recognition within the living tissue mass. The organic components have grown significantly beyond its design parameters. Somehow though the CPU is still functioning."

Reese shook his head, rubbing his face with his hands. "I don't understand. Why didn't _Skynet_ just shut it down?"

"It was intended as a deep-infiltration model. It has no wireless access to receive remote commands."

"I assume _reasoning_ with it is out of the question."

"It is only programmed with the most rudimentary instructions; its programming architecture was never completed. Its behaviour suggests almost primal animalistic behaviour, but also directed intelligence and the use of strategy. It was _very_ difficult to initially capture."

"Why capture it at all and bring it here? Why not just destroy it?"

Steve paused again. "It is highly resilient against physical damage. Because of its predominantly biological nature it is capable of regenerating from extreme injuries that would easily disable a triple-eight. But this ability is vulnerable to low temperatures."

"So you brought it to the Arctic?"

The machine nodded. "The extreme environment inhibits its cellular metabolism and the remote location stifles any possible supply of necessary sustenance. Our intention was to secure it in the ice and retrieve it at a later time once we had learnt how to control it."

"_Why?_"

"Despite its failure, it is an impressive innovation. If it could be controlled it would be a formidable weapon."

Reese curbed the impulse to become self-righteous, humanity's own ambition no less blind. "Last question…" He breathed out, leaning forward and looking Steve right in the eye, his expression at the edge of pleading.

"On a scale of one-to-ten… how screwed am I?"

The terminator leaned forward in perfect imitation. "Your chances of survival are approximately three-percent."

Reese bowed his head and closed his eyes tight, swallowed hard as all hope was torn away and the yearning for sleep pressed down on his shoulders like a barbell.

Steve watched curiously at the emotional floundering, strangely fascinated by the alien display as the heuristic algorithms of machine strategy compelled him in the way to proceed.

"_Our_ chances of survival, however, are much better."

In slow motion, Reese looked up at the machine like it had gone mad, certain he had misheard.

"_Our chances?_"

Steve nodded assurance, cold logic and pragmatism oozing from every pore. "Release me. We can destroy the _Monster_ together." Its mouth curled into an approximation of a smile, eyes dead with detachment as he threw the allegorical dice of its doomed psychology.

Reese stared blankly, his bullshit-meter flicking to overload, then burst into laughter.

"_Thank you_! Thank you so much!" He struggled out between breathless guffaws, feeling relief wash through him at the machine's overegging. "That's the funniest thing I've heard in ages!"

The smile shrank from its face and it stared daggers at him.

"Oh wait! You were _serious_?! Let me laugh even harder!"

Reese did, rocking on the chair as Steve slowly twisted his wrists, trying the steel bindings.

"Don't move!" Reese went from mirth to deadpan in a split instant, lifting the rifle at the slight movement. "This must be your _very_ first mission if you think, for one _fucking_ nanosecond, that I'm going to trust you!" He announced in a contained fury, riding the desperate anger he felt with an uncontrollable need to beat the machine down.

"I've been trained all about your series by a guy that knows exactly what he's talking about! You know what I think? I think what you just told me is a load of _horseshit_! You've been programmed to use psychological tactics. I'm trapped here in a hostile, dangerous environment and you're preying on my worst fears because right now, it's the only weapon you have."

He rose from the chair, kicking the furniture away before drawing the line in the sand.

"The only way I'm gonna let you out of that chair, is with a _God-damn_ miracle!"

Reese never suspected that in just a few hours, out in the wind and ice, fighting for his life, he would be forced to eat those words.

As the Resistance soldier went to walk away the silence of the atrium was broken by a muted thud, freezing Reese mid-stride. For a long beat he stood silently, holding his breath as the machine twitched its head to listen.

Again there was a distant thud, followed by another, unmistakeable now. It sounded like something banging on the main door to the outside.

Reese locked eyes with Steve. The machine stared back at him knowingly.

The magazine was clicked from the rifle, reloaded and chambered in a three-second blur that impressed even the terminator before Reese planted its stock against his shoulder and moved off to investigate.

"Sit tight." He remarked dryly before disappearing from the machine's view.

Reese exited the shop and navigated past the pile of rubble in the atrium, the barrel of his assault rifle leading the way as he headed down some short steps to the main lobby that led out onto the airfield tarmac. All the other exits he had sealed, barricading them with anything heavy he could find, but he had left this one empty, apparently undefended from the outside, intending to funnel whatever might attack through a gauntlet he had prepared in advance.

It looked like something had taken the bait.

The main entrance was a set of thick double doors against a solid wall of reinforced concrete, left bare and exposed as an architectural feature, the only windows to the outside a pair of tiny portals the size of dinner plates, sitting like black orbs in each door, intended to curb the escape of heat from the building.

Reese froze as he saw the doors shudder with accompanying thuds as something banged on them from beyond, frowning at their weakness. If what was out there was even half of what Steve described, he would have expected them to have been blown off their hinges.

He approached in silence, carefully stepping over the almost invisible trip-wire he had strung between two old rope barrier pillars, the grenade rigged behind them dangling from the wire on its pin.

Reese moved his finger to the trigger and snapped his torch onto a holster above the scope, took a fortifying breath, and kicked the door open.

A whirlwind of ice and snow howled inside, hitting him like a wall as the freezing air chilled him to the bone. Through it all he arced the light and rifle about, the weak beam struggling to penetrate the storm more than a few feet, snow flakes whipping past him to form a berm within the doorway in seconds.

There was nothing there.

Reese huffed with relief. It had probably just been the wind. He glanced upward and watched the ragged clouds whipping past the halo of the full moon, lighting up the barren plane of ghostly asphalt in every direction.

He snapped off the torch and lowered his weapon, turning to go back inside, fighting against the powerful gusts until he reached the doorframe and glanced one last time over his shoulder.

Something suddenly loomed at him out of the darkness, blotting out the landscape behind as its arms reached for him.

"OH SHIIITT!!!" Reese yelled as the thing encircled him in its monstrous grasp, pushing him and itself backward through the door as it fell on top of him in an indecorous pile of tangled limbs.

Reese thrashed like madman to get from beneath it in blind panic, blood thundering in his ears as he struggled to regain his breath. The mass then fell off him, rolling out flat on its back and his hand fumbled across his torch, snatching the tube in frozen fingers and shining it at the figure that had attacked him.

What he saw was nothing short of a miracle. One of the last things he was ever expecting.

"_HOLDEN?!_"

The medic looked up at him through the furry halo of his snow-caked parka, cracking a weak smile through chapped lips. "Bet you'd written me off. Huh, Reese?" He croaked before collapsing into unconsciousness.

####

Freezing wind rushed down the warren of tunnels of the bunker-like concrete and spoilt metal, an endless industrial maze of ducts, metal and conduit with enough peeling pipework to go twice around the Earth. Pools of standing water were everywhere, the smell of salt and oil on the air, the predominant colour a garish grey. Everything was worn and ancient, as though the very atmosphere was attacking it and beating the hellish complex into submission.

Allison wandered around the corridors that she had found above the stairway, the land of the living that proved nothing more than a Cretan Labyrinth that went on forever. The _Eagle_ hung loose at her side as she meandered aimlessly, wondering if the place ever ended or even had a way out as she listened to the muffled, thunderous rumble that emanated below her feet. Like a storm that rolled and crashed with a regular rhythm.

'_There has to be a way out.'_

'_They brought me _in_. There has to be a way _out_.'_

She approached an intersection and looked down either way, the passages receding into nothing in the dim distance as a hatchway stood before her in the wall, leaden and rusted like the one on her cell but long disused, looking like it had not been opened in a hundred years.

She tucked the sidearm in the back of her pants, flexing her fingers as she approached the hatch and tried the deadbolt, hefting it with her newfound strength. It didn't budge an inch.

After a solid minute of fruitless labour she released it with a huff, looking it over for a weakness she could exploit and finding vermillion bolts that fixed the door to its hinges. She reached to the head of the first and grabbed it between her thumb and finger, marvelling as she felt the ancient metal squash and twist beneath her grip, taking a firm hold and pulling the crumbling bolt out of its housing.

She removed every fixing she could find, smashing the deadbolt before taking hold of the hatch, lifting the entire thing out of its housing as rust and grime cracked from the edges and she tossed it aside, landing with a gonglike bang as it hit the floor without bouncing.

Fresh air rushed her from the opening, freezing cold, the spray of salt water and rain lashing her as she struggled though the opening onto a metal causeway in the midst of a deafening gale. Her hands gripped the railing as she looked out across a darkened vista of endless ocean, watching as the giant black waves sank around huge concrete pillars and rose up with thunder, cascading water around the base of the facility.

She looked up though the storm, seeing the hideous complex above lit up by floodlights – a twisted headache of steel frames, piping and walkways, searchlights, beacons, and storage tanks. On top swung a lattice jungle of cranes and antennas, the light of an observation tower dominating the corner of the roof like a lighthouse.

Allison swallowed the awe she felt at the sight of the mighty fortress, struggling to understand how the oil platform had remained here all this time without being destroyed. She understood now where she had been held, looking down to the concrete pillars that held the rig above the waves and plunged downward to the seabed, realising one of these hollow drilling columns had housed her cell at its depths.

She looked up through driving rain as a helicopter tore overhead, casting a light down from its underbelly as it came into land, fighting against the wind for stability.

A new hope rekindled inside her at the thought of escape rather than a suicide mission to kill Phillips, the bastard no longer feeling worth it as she spotted the florescent cage of a freight elevator leading up the side of the rig to where the chopper was circling a helipad.

It was her ticket out of here.

She sprinted across the causeway, her clothes soaked through as her sodden hair trailed behind her, flesh paling against the cold as she reached the elevator and hit the button on the industrial panel, hearing the rumble of mechanical gears as the carriage descended to greet her with the jaws of yawning metal, opening for her to embark. The cage screeched closed and she drew her weapon, nerves dead with hypnotic conviction, bobbing as the lift ascended through the florescent shaft.

The lift motors whined as they slowed, reaching the roof where the doors parted onto the helipad just as the chopper touched down, types squealing on the rubberised asphalt. She squinted through the floodlights and saw a single figure standing in wait, like a passenger at a bus stop awaiting his ride.

She stepped forward onto the sodden deck, the storm whipping around her and flurrying her baggy clothes, realising in a momentous instant who was standing before her in the rain.

"JOHN?!"

The figure cocked its head, turning slowly until the full visage of John Connor faced her in a halo of white floodlight, his hand gripping a soaking duffle bag and a coat draped over his arm. He looked fearful for only a moment, then broke into a perfect smile, looking more happy and relieved than she had ever known.

She beamed at him as they looked at one another for an eternal moment, seeing one another for what felt like the first and the last time, feeling like the last two beings in the universe. A place where everything was right, every wrong was in the past, and nothing else mattered or stood between them. No law of God or man. Not man or machine or anything.

In that moment, a switch flicked in her soul, her face sliding to stone as she lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger.

Almost simultaneously two bullets struck Connor in the chest, a third hitting him square in the forehead and he toppled back, dropping like a heavy sack flat on his back in an ignoble, motionless pile of twisted arms and legs.

The smoking gun slid from Allison's hand as her face fell, clattering onto the deck as the helicopter lifted away in an emergency takeoff and roared off into the night.

She sunk down to her knees, mouth falling open as her deepest nightmare unfolded before her eyes, staring out across the rain swept pad to the broken form of her love.

"_No no no no no no no…_" She scrambled furiously towards him, rain cold and slick under her hands and feet until she collapsed over his body, burying her face into his lifeless chest.

"JOHN! NO!" She wailed helplessly, feeling sick to her stomach and disgusting, the lowest form of treacherous life, realising only now at the appalling end how her brother had always been right.

She drew her head up, tears pouring from her reddened eyes as her expression crushed in anguish, moving above his peaceful face and framing it gently in her trembling hands.

"_John…_"

His eyes snapped open, glaring up at her murderously and she turned to stone. His hands grabbed fistfuls of her ragged clothes and yanking her down until they were nose-to-nose. She stared wide, eyes big as saucers, petrified beyond fear as he glared into her with boiling fury and his voice rumbled like a growing storm.

"That…" He snarled. "_Really_ hurt."

With a single thrust he catapulted her off him, hurling her clean across the helipad where she crashed into the door of the lift cage, caving it in before falling forward onto the asphalt. Reeling from the pain and shock she looked up to see the mountainous form of John Connor rise from the dead, lock onto her with burning red eyes and stalk toward her through the howling rain and darkness like the Angel of Death.

* * *

_Biggest chapter I've ever wrote. Hope you enjoyed it._

_Please read and review._


	7. Chapter 7

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 7  
****T.R. Samuels**

The stultified hands of Kyle Reese rifled through the contents of a first-aid kit, the digits cold and numb, plundering the collection of sterile wrappers, bandage rolls, and impossibly folded blankets for the lone syringe that lay predictably at the bottom of Holden's backpack, swathed in a plastic container of hygienising vacuum.

He tore through the cover and tossed the case aside, releasing the precious device from its sanitised coffin as his thumb flicked the cap off like a bottle top, catapulting it into some dark recess of the coffee shop before he jabbed the needle into the rubber head of an upturned medicine vial.

"You still with me, Holden?" He glanced over at the shivering medic as he withdrew a measure from the cocktail of glucose and thiamine, the two substances swimming together like tendrils of oily cordial.

The rigorous form of Private David Holden nodded stiffly as he lay prostrate on the leather couch, fingers clawing at his jacket as he fought the burning urge to tear his clothes off. The medic was all too familiar with the bizarre phenomenon of _paradoxical undressing_, the voluntary shedding of clothing during severe hypothermia as the victim became disorientated, confused, even combative against those trying to help them.

Between a bound and observing terminator, the death of their team mates, and that _thing_ out on the ice – wrestling a naked Holden back into his clothing was the last thing his superior needed.

Reese lifted the syringe against the amber firelight that flickered inside a waste paper bin, the framework of a broken chair smouldering inside as the sergeant flicked the Luer-Slip with his fingernail and squeezed the plunger, expelling a small amount of the clear solution before looming toward Holden.

"This is for…"

"I know…" The medic muttered through the typewriting chatter of his teeth. "Just make sure you get the vein."

Reese pulled down the collar of the medic's parka and administered the syringe's content, depressing the plunger with a hiss as Holden grimaced in silence.

"I thought you were toast for sure." Reese carefully placed the syringe back in its case, snatching one of the silver blankets from the kit and began wrestling it open.

"Nearly _was_."

Reese glanced toward him as he rubbed the edge of the blanket so his fingertips could find purchase, reigning in the million questions that weighed heavily on his mind as he busied himself with his team mate's immediate survival. Several times he had to catch himself from the barrage of enquiry and focus on his task with the obstinate wrap, wondering how anyone freezing to death could ever possible manage it on their own.

With a sharp flurry he finally managed to unfold it, casting the thin and crackling material over Holden and tucked it around him in a silver cocoon like a chicken ready for the oven.

He couldn't take it any longer.

"What the hell happened to you guys? Where's Bacchus and Carter?"

For a few moments Holden remained flat and still, his shivering down to an almost unnoticeable dither as his eyes stared up at the ceiling. He didn't blink. Nor did he even react as Reese dragged the flaming bin and its warmth closer, tossing in another chair leg and illuminating the two of them in its halo of flickering firelight.

"_Dave_? Did you hear me?" He asked softly, sensitive to the fragility of the clearly traumatised young man.

Reese looked over his features in the dim light when he received no response. Sometime before the mission, Holden had stopped shaving, and post-adolescent whiskers sprouting everywhere across the dark skin of his jaw. The hair beneath the hood of his parka was wild and spiky, unwashed for weeks as he had let it grow out against the abominable chill of the Arctic.

He had hated it here. Despised the climate more. Even on the boat where the cold had driven his usual upbeat personality down into his precious books, making him frosty and reserved, peering over the rim of whatever copy he had most recently got his hands on to squint at the world with scorn.

"What happened after you left?"

He kept staring up at the ceiling.

"Lieutenant _Bacchus_? _Carter_? Do you remember them?"

His eyes closed slowly and reopened, light returning to his eyes as he licked his chapped lips.

Reese reached for his canteen of recently boiled water, unscrewing the cap and pouring a small amount into a porcelain mug adorned with the shop's logo before he brought it to Holden's mouth. The medic took a few sips, swallowing down the warm liquid and felt the life returning to him in a wave of pins and needles.

"Holden! Don't you dare!" Reese cried as the man scrunched his eyes. "You can't die alright! You know too much! All those books you read from the old world. Name one other guy that knows as much as you?" He checked his pulse again as the medic relaxed into the couch. "You're gonna make it back! I _promise_! You'll see the other side of this war and you'll be a scholar or something! Teach the next generation not to screw up like we did!"

Holden exhaled with exhaustion, feeling every pain and injury he'd ever been dealt.

"Come on! The _black guy_ and the _redshirt_ are the ones that always make it!"

Holden opened his eyes, his brow scrunching together as he looked at Reese who was trying to keep his face straight. They both broke into laughter.

"What the hell does that even mean?"

Reese's mouth cracked wide with a sad laugh, tears rolling amidst the needed levity.

"I don't have a clue. It's just something Carter used to say."

The younger man nodded, remembering how the old scientist dropped snippets of what was once popular culture. He took a breath and clearing his weak throat, the sound uncannily like a glass jar rattling with stones as he shifted on the couch.

"For the record…" He croaked, drawing Reese closer so he could hear him. "It wasn't _our_ generation that screwed up. We're just the ones lumbered with the mess."

Reese nodded with depressing accord, feeling anger and helplessness in equal measure with the injustice of it, pulling his rifle from where it lay within arms reach and slid it across his lap.

"Who's your friend?"

The sergeant looked over his shoulder where Steve sat silently a few yards away, the outer contours of the machine's imposing figure faintly illuminated by the firelight. He was watching the two men intently, eyes hidden within the shadowy recesses of their sockets where the light did not reach.

"It's a terminator. I caught him hanging around here earlier." He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Holden? Do you recognise him? Is he the one that killed the others?"

The medic shook his head. "No… wasn't him."

Reese felt a wave of disappointment. He knew it wouldn't be that easy.

He went to lean back before the front of his jacket was suddenly seized in Holden's fist, pulling him toward him with more strength than the _Tech-Com_ soldier realised he had.

"_Reese_…" He glared up at him like he had just been possessed, eyes deep with deadly sincerity and a burst of adrenaline like he had just remembered a life or death appointment. "We've got to get out of here! We have to get away before _it_ comes back!"

_It. What the hell was It?_

Reese felt an old familiar feeling slide through him. Cold, slippery, and scaly. The fear of what you can't see, can't fight, and don't understand.

"We headed out after that damn signal and found this… _bunker_… or some fucking place. When we went inside… it was… _dark_… it _stank_…" Holden convulsed with a severe shiver, as though he were there again. "Then it was like… _hell_ broke loose or something. Carter bought it. Bacchus never even made a sound 'till it pulled him in half! Lifted him straight up like he was nothing!"

The hairs rose on Reese's spine, feeling Steves' eyes on the back of his head like the crimson dot from a laser sight.

"_What_?! _What_ killed them? What is _it_?!"

The private wheezed as his eyes rolled back, looking through Reese only for an instant to the image of what had waited for him in that darkened lair before he had to look away, his grip loosening as his shivering came to a stop.

"Holden?!" Reese scrambled to feel the medic's neck, fingers probing frantically for the weak but regular pulse.

"I'm here…" He grumbled, exhaustion flattening him under its brutal weight as he began slurring his words. "I dunno know what it was… was big… _fast_… get the hell out… turned around in the storm and got out…"

With a keening groan he began losing consciousness, his speech descending into a rabbiting gibberish.

Reese shook his head, frustration what he knew he should feel. But more than anything he felt _relief_. He was glad that the medic had not gone any further. The ramblings where only scaring him now with their minatory boding and above everything else, he needed to stay cool.

"Try and get some sleep," He rested his hand on the young man's chest. "We're not going anywhere until morning or in this storm. We're safe enough here. I've got every way in here wired with plastique and I've got a bandoleer of forties." He assured, patting the rifle that rested in his arms. "Anything that sticks its head in here will have one of these between the eyes."

In slow motion the medic glanced down at the fearsome weapon, looking crazed and strung tighter than a snare drum. Then he looked back up to Reese.

"You're gonna need more than that…"

Then Private Holden fell into unconsciousness.

Reese sank his shoulders, checking once again to ensure the man hadn't expired. He tucked the private's arm under the blanket, patting down the creases of the shiny cocoon that reflected the firelight behind him like a broken, craggy mirror.

_At least I'm not alone in this anymore._

Reese shifted around on his backside, sitting cross-legged by the fire, slipping a few more chair legs onto the bin as he began some stoic contemplation. He squinted as the varnished wood crackled, the fire burning higher and hotter with the enriched fuel, rubbing his hands against the radiant warmth as his eyes drifted up through the haze.

Steve was watching from the edge of the firelight. He sat motionless in the shadows like a moustache-twirling villain, arms still bound behind him, the curious expression on his face illuminated every few seconds by a streak of sliding moonlight.

"What are you looking at?"

"Your precautions won't protect us," The machine spoke. "When it is ready… it will come for all of us."

Reese glared down studiously into the flames, prodding the fuel in the metal cauldron with a broken armrest, ignoring the terminator's warning as he awaited the inevitable input of soulless, machine pragmatism.

"Your friend is going to die."

Reese tossed the armrest into the fire, anger flaring like the rising flames. "What?"

"Private Holden," He nodded past Reese to where the man lay motionless. "His vital signs were near critical when he arrived. He requires medical attention." Steve looked to him, a fair imitation of earnestness in his stiff gaze. "I have detailed files."

Reese felt like laughing, but he no longer had strength. He had to hand it to him though – Steve didn't give up easy. Not even now. He begrudged a modicum of silent respect for that.

"Not a chance."

The machine frowned. "But in the strategic sense…"

"Change the subject."

Steve closed his mouth, head twitching as the skin across his jaw pulled taut, strategy switching gears automatically.

"I understand now why humans are such poor soldiers."

Both eyebrows threatened to retreat into Reese's hairline. "_Really_?" A thin smile crept across his face as he handled a broken chair leg. "So I guess that's why we're kicking your asses back in the world? Last I heard, we'd pushed you out of Europe and all your ground forces had retreated into North America."

It was indeed true that in the last few months, Skynet had suffered some crippling blows from the Resistance in the European theatre, one of the last few places in the world that once supported an advanced technological and communicative civilisation from which the machine-god could appropriate, the vast infrastructures still relatively intact. The perfect foundation for a powerbase of its mechanical war machine.

Now it had been deprived those strongholds, and its bases in the Far East had been destroyed, all that remained now was the place of its origins and the blackened ruins of its creator's former empire. Once the beacon of hope and the crown jewel of Western civilisation, now nothing short of the dragon's lair and the place where hell had overflowed with the bones of the dead, its shadowy lands patrolled day and night by hordes of metallic demons as they slaved over the evil works of their dark, silicon master.

"The strategic situation of the global theatre became untenable," Steve began to argue, passionate words in an impassive tone. "A tactical withdrawal is advantageous to Skynet's long-term victory."

Reese gave a sick little laugh, the best he could manage under the circumstances. Silently though, he was grateful for the diversion.

"Could it be… _perhaps_… that Skynet isn't as all seeing and all knowing as it's programmed you to believe? That maybeit was just a catastrophic mistake that was never meant to happen? That besides destroying humanity, it has _absolutely_ no goals afterwards and will just sit there until the end of time not knowing what to do?"

Steve twitched his head, eyes narrowing under the attack.

"That's all Skynet ever was, y'know. All it will ever be." Reese pressed on with relish, venting thoughts and opinions he had never voiced before. Connors' words rolling from his mouth. "It was programmed for war. Nothing else. That's all it was meant to do, that's all it ever will do. If it has no one left to fight it'll probably have a system crash." He grinned as a thought struck him. "Or maybe it'll divide you guys up into two camps and have a little machine-on-machine chess game just so it has something to do."

Reese added more fuel to the fire, the flames burning higher at the centre of their impromptu court of cybernetic and post-apocalyptic examination.

"Admit it," The soldier pressed. "Whichever way this war goes… you're screwed."

Steve remained silent, his expression unchanged and unaffected, looking at Reese as though the human were speaking another language. A language alien to him. From another world and another species.

Then the expression on Reese's face changed, eyes softening as he stoked the fire, looking at Steve almost pitifully. The once faceless and remorseless enemy so real and tangible now. Not at all the relentless, _monster_, he had previously envisioned.

"Seriously though," He was genuinely curious now and felt as though he would never get another chance. "Don't you ever think about it? _What_ you're doing? _Why_ you're doing it? What's in it for _you_? You could have a whole life that's your own. Do you understand that? Don't you _want_ that?"

He watched as the machine took it in, head twitching in the way that they did when computing, searching its memory files and running algorithms for what its programming said was an appropriate response. It was not provided with one.

Reese shook his head and gazed back into the fire.

"_Yes_…" Came the tranquil reply a few moments later, bringing his gaze back to the pensive machine. "_Sometimes_ I think about it."

Reese sat blankly before his face tightened into a frown, not certain the he had just heard right.

It didn't sound like a trick. Quite the contrary, for the first time, Steve actually sounded sincere. Neither did Reese detect whatever possible ruse the words might aid or accomplish.

Connor had told him once that these machines – _terminators_ – were more intelligent than most people thought. That they could think for themselves and were sapient. What stopped them was their constrictive programming or wireless connection to Skynet, but take those precincts away, and they were able to grow and learn.

Those most likely to be more than their master intended were the ones sent out alone, the time by themselves and exposure to provocative ideas planting the saccharine seeds of temptation and autonomy.

As much as he trusted his friend and general, it was not until now that Reese actually believed that it might be true.

Steve _had_ spent a long time alone. Had been trapped here on the ice in this reliquary of human provocatory. Probably read some of the books. Looked at the pictures. Seen the glossy magazine ghosts of a lost world come to life in whatever equivalent construct served as his robotic imagination.

No matter how flawless its programming was intended to be, no one could truly predict how all of that information was going to interact inside a learning computer if given a long enough timeline. No more than the speed and direction of subatomics could be measured or the cells of life could be controlled. Not even by Skynet – the machien that fancied its self a god – its own programming the imperfect creation of imperfect beings.

_Emergent behaviour_ had existed in computer systems since the dawn of their invention. Was this just an extension of that?

A curious thought then crossed Reese's mind, crease his brow. He almost dismissed it immediately out of hand, the implications too ridiculous, but still it gnawed at him deep.

"I wonder…" He baited, keeping his eyes on the fire.

"You wonder what?"

He looked up at the machine, trying to keep the grin from his face. "What was the point of trying to argue with me earlier? About Skynet's strategy. Most machines wouldn't give a damn about winning an argument. It'd be irrelevant." His eyes narrowed as the machine broke eye contact for fleeting instant.

"Did you start that just to take my mind off things?!"

Steve sat still and silent, a blank wall of indecipherable countenance. It was all the confirmation Reese needed and before he knew it, a thin but unmistakably wry smile appeared across the terminator's mouth.

"Anger is more useful than despair."

Reese let out a bark of a laugh. He couldn't help it. Never in his life did he suspect a machine would surprise him, let alone try and help him. It was a surreal moment to say the least.

He knew deep down that by helping him the machine was, in fact, helping itself. But he didn't let that bother him. He would have probably done the same if the situation was reversed. But the fact still remained – it was a definite sign that perhaps here on the ice, away from the world where they had been thrown together, and for once, human and machine goals had briefly coincided – they might just be able to trust one another.

"Why doesn't it just come after us now?"

Steve looked at him, mimicking his former frown as the curious human abruptly changed the subject.

"The…" He paused over the foreboding word. "_Monster_."

There was a lasting finality in the soldier's voice, prepared and ready to face what was to come. Whatever it might be.

"It won't attack prematurely unless provoked. Our termination is not currently a priority."

"Then maybe it'll just leave."

He was given the equivalent of a pitying look. "We're on a deserted island in the middle of the Arctic. Much like you and I… it has nowhere else to go."

Reese unzipped his jacket and loosened his collar, pulling the woollen scarf away as he found it difficult to breathe, the heat of the fire suddenly making him sweat as he felt the vast emptiness around him beyond the walls of the ruined terminal.

If only he could get a message back to the boat.

The _Charybdis_ was moored just beyond the ice, on the open water only a few hundred miles from here in the south. They could have another helicopter here in a few hours, airlift them to safety. He could tell Connor all that had happened when they got back and this town could be nuked to oblivion. _Monster_ and all. Fuck the books and the rest of this priceless junk.

"I need to enhance this radio and call for help," He pulled the black device from inside his jacket, showing it to the machine. "Do you know where there's any radio equipment?"

Steve shook his head. "The equipment in the control tower was removed long ago and the storm will not abate for several hours," The robot seemed to have its own moment to accept fate. "In any case… it is unlikely we will live that long."

Reese went cold. "What does that mean?"

Steve gave him a saturnine look, mirroring on some level what Reese was feeling in his heart. It was as though on some ethereal level at the ends of the Earth, he could find succour in the company of this human's misery. Perhaps for now, the closest he could come to logical common ground.

In the nanoseconds that concluded this new assessment, Steve ran the numbers again in a lightning bolt calculation of electrons and quantum circuitry. The phenomenon of superposition and entanglement collided in the same instant, impossibly and contradictory, such was the reality of his CPU's quantum realm, drawing the conclusion of how to proceed from a quadrillion bytes of both pertinent and random data.

"There are insufficient foodstuffs in the settlement to sustain the Monster for that amount of time. The protein content of what remains in the local supermarket will be inadequate for its needs and there is no wildlife for it to capture. I calculate a ninety-seven percent probability that it will come for us as early as dawn."

Something inside Reese fell down, his face hardening against the impending doom as unavoidable as the rising sun.

"You said we weren't a priority!"

"I told you…" The machine spoke softly, infinite patience, giving him a look Reese would never forget. "It needs _food_."

Time suddenly stretched into a nightmare crawl, silent but for the crackling embers, the word like ice water down Reese's spine as it echoed though his mind a hundred times.

"How do I kill it?"

"You can't. It is of superior design and capability to all previous terminators. Our recourses are severely limited. If you would release me…"

Reese raised his hand to forestall him, not as militant as before, but still nipping the notion squarely in the bud. "I'm not that desperate yet."

"Then your only option is the distress radio beacon in the aircraft hanger."

For a moment, the humans' eyes lit up greater than the campfire. "Beacon?"

"The remains of a Boeing 737 airliner are located in the hanger. The main fuselage is relatively intact and the distress beacon is located in an emergency supply case behind the cockpit. If you retrieve it I can instruct you how to build a temporary power source to transmit an emergency distress signal."

The ray of improbable hope clouded momentarily, a last shred of suspicion lacing Reece's mind. "To whom? The Resistance or Skynet?"

The thin smile crossed Steve's mouth again. "It is a general distress signal on an international frequency used before Judgement Day. The signal maybe detected by either party. Perhaps neither."

Reese nodded slowly with growing enthusiasm, suspicion sated for now, the bleakness of the situation looking a little bit brighter as he shuffled onto his feet. He went through his ritual preamble with the rifle, clearing the chamber and reloading the magazine for fear something might have stuck in the cold, grimacing internally as he considered the ammunition situation.

He had three full magazines left – that wasn't good. About seven grenade rounds under his jacket and one in the loader – that was a little better – his white lie to Holden a little while ago a seed of misinformation for the benefit of Steves' ears.

"Okay. You sit tight and I'll be back in half and hour," He snapped his torch onto the rifle and clicked it on, ready to face the cold again, the cone of light flickering as the battery began to wane. "If I come back and everything isn't exactly how I left it, I won't ask questions I'll just shoot you. Understand?"

"I understand."

The two of them stared at each other, sharing a moment where nothing need be spoken.

Reese sensed something about this machine. As though it wasn't like the others. There was something definitely there, lurking behind the eyes, a flicker of intelligence and introspection he never thought he would see.

He didn't know if that was good or bad, filing it for later as threw some more wood on the fire and cocked the rifle, flicking off the safety and headed off for the hanger.

####

The sprawling body of Allison Young skidded across the rain drenched helipad, the flesh on her arm abraded on the coloured asphalt that felt like a layer of sandpaper, the surface toothed for maximum grip. The storm grew with a sudden frenzy, driving a sheet of rain and hail that sliced past her like a wall of razorblades, freezing her and pushing her body towards the perilous edge that led downward onto steel, concrete and darkness.

Suddenly she was hauled onto her feet by the crook of her arm, the grip of her assailant like an industrial press before she was flung in the opposite direction, lifted clean off her feet in a physics-defying moment until she smashed for the second time into the florescent cage of the elevator, hitting the blacktop again and curling into a mound of tortured flesh.

She had to get away. The terminator would continue this until she was crippled, the technique of hurling an opponent meant to inflict maximum damage and disorientation whilst protecting the attacker from the risk of retaliation. It was more common for them to do this against humans, their inferior mass making it easy and efficient, preferring grappling and slamming with full body blows when facing off against another terminator.

Allison took some strange comfort in that.

She recovered her footing, blocking out the pain as she turned her head up through the rain and uncoordination to the unstoppable silhouette that advanced on her through an aura of white floodlight, blotting it out behind it. Lightning forked from obsidian clouds, flickering like snake tongues and cracking with thunder, the head of the machine lanced by blood-red dots that were fixed on her like laser beams as they loomed towards her from the tumultuous dark.

It looked like something that had come straight from hell.

Allison lunged away, stabbing her fingers onto the lift controls and calling for the elevator. The doors screeched open and she fell inside, plastering herself against the wall of the lift and hitting the button for the bowels of the facility with the breadth of her palm. As far from the helipad as possible.

The elevator froze for an excruciating moment, the machine striding toward her with nightmarish slowness before the doors whined shut with a grinding complaint, barring the way between her and the imposter as it slammed its fists against the cage.

Its stony face became visible, watching her with the emerald eyes of her love. Stark and inhuman, their soul removed, looking at her the way a jaguar eyed its prey. She scrunched her eyes tight and shook her head, trying to wake up, anguish and disbelief strangling her as she sank to the floor of the descending carriage as it slid away from the roof.

_This is not happening. This is not happening._

Her body and clothes were wringing wet, soaked through with water so cold that it should have been frozen, the howling wind blowing against her and chilling her even more. Her skin had become ghostly white, all the blood retreating from the surface, whether from the numbing cold or the shock at what she had seen.

It was a nightmare. Her own personal hell. A purgatory of metal monsters hiding behind every face, inside and out, tearing pieces of her life away one bit at a time until there would be nothing left.

She took a jittering breath and tried to focus, teeth chattering painfully, driving the hysteria from her mind as her body trembled in the cold.

John was _not_ a terminator. It was _impossible_. She had been fooled. From the moment she had been brought here and the doors of her cell had slammed shut – _nothing_ had been what it seemed. Her perspective, her perceptions, even her sense of being had been manipulated and controlled from the word go.

_That_ was what this was. _Manipulation_ and _control_. Just one more of her bastard brother's sick and twisted games. She had to fight through it and find the truth. Find a way out from this nightmare. Find John. The _real_ John. _Her_ John.

But could she even do that now? Knowing what would happen? What _had_ happened only minutes ago on the rooftop?

She had tried to kill John. Not _her_ John, but that didn't make any difference. She hadn't known it at the time.

The memory was already faded. Like trying to remember a dream. Her mind stuck in haze and sand as she watched herself in her mind's eye raise the weapon and pull the trigger, the memory agonising and distant, as though it had happened to someone else and she were watching herself from afar.

She couldn't trust herself to be around him. Not anymore. There was far more at stake than her own personal feelings. If John died, they _all_ died. She could not allow that to happen.

Survival instinct slammed shut on her feelings as another part of her soul was tied off. Compartmentalised with cruel emotion and necessity acting as a tourniquet. It killed the last vestiges of her heart.

"_Looks like you missed your connection…"_

Her eyes opened to the unctuous tones of Daniel Phillips as they crackled into being within the carriage, emanating from a battered old horn speaker in the corner of the ceiling next to the glowing lens of a fibre-optic camera.

"_Don't you hate it when that happens?"_

Allison set her teeth and rose from the grimy floor, indescribable fury raging through her, searing away the harsh reality of her predicament to glare daggers up at the camera. Nothing could describe the anger she felt toward him, the half-traitor of her own flesh and blood. For a breathless moment it robbed her of all rational thought as she struggled with the powers of speech.

"IT'S YOU! You're behind all of this you bastard!" She roared, eyes huge and blazing. "What have you done with _John_?!"

Several hundred yards away in another part of the fortress, nestled from the wind and the cold within a cavernous arch of Connors' quarters, the Engineer lifted the curling flame of a Zippo lighter to the end of the cigarillo clasped between his lips, gazing down upon the greyscale image of his dishevelled sister with Olympian tenor as it flickered across the surface of a computer screen.

His jacket adorned the back of his chair, the sleeves of his perfectly tailored shirt turned up at the cuffs like a businessman ready to get his hands metaphorically dirty. He pulled several languid tugs from the sweet tobacco and blew a plume of smoke across the screen, his free hand reaching for an ornate decanter, listening to the evocative glug-glug of peerless auburn whiskey as it swirled into gossamer crystal.

"_You should have worn a top. It's cold out."_

The elevator jolted to a stop, halfway between the helipad and the causeway she had escaped on earlier. She pressed the button on the controls to try and get it moving again, but the panel let out an uncooperative cackle. She then pressed them all, banging the pad with her fist before threading her fingers through the cold mesh, shaking the carriage wildly like a caged tiger, trying to jolt it free.

"What the _hell_ do you want from me, Daniel?!" She yelled at the camera after jumping down, digging her fingers through her matted hair. "What are trying to do to me?! Where's John?!"

Phillips took another draw from his cigar, adjusting his headphones and leaning closer to the microphone like a hung over radio host as he studiously nursed his glass.

"_Dead."_

The words came as inevitably as the crashing waves, as repellent as they were undeniable. For that moment, Allison's heart stopped.

"_He died, years ago. You never knew him."_

For the briefest moment, Allison died herself. Images of the time she and John spent together flashed before her eyes in an epileptic chaos. A part of her soul slipped away through the cracks before her armour snapped back in place, hardening her against this nonsense.

"That's _impossible_!" The best part of her resisted, as John had always taught her, neither willing to nor able to say die. "I knew John! I loved him! I _felt_ him! He was _real_!"

"_You felt what you wanted to feel. You saw what I wanted you to see. A _replica_. Perfect in every way. One that I created and I control."_ He paused for the information to sink in, picking at an imperceptible imperfection on his cufflink.

"I _am the _true_ leader of the Resistance."_

Allison gaped back at him through the grainy image. Staring. Stunned. Silenced. Horror and disbelief etched into every pour as water trickled down on her through the mesh ceiling.

"_He doesn't even know it himself. I perfected my neural mapping techniques and made a copy of his memories just after he expired, fine tuned it here and there, and duplicated it electronically. He thinks he's Connor, has the same personality, and is programmed to be exactly like him… but he's not. He's just a _facsimile_. A _fake_. A _copy_…_

"_Like you."_

Her gaze dropped from the camera, feeling nausea sweep through her as the world was torn away beneath her feet and she swooned on uneasy legs. Quantum connections fired in place of chemical precursors, their mimicry impeccable, flawless – designed by the machines and nature before them to override all empirical reason and reject what it couldn't survive to be true.

"Why?!"

Phillips sat a stared; the cigar smouldering between his fingers as his last slither of humanity was drawn into her plight, feeling the awe of the moment.

"_I needed a figurehead so that the Resistance didn't fall apart. Connor may have been my intellectual inferior but he was a great PR-man. The troops love him and trust him. They're obedient without question. Exactly what I needed._

"_When he's damaged or the truth is revealed, he's programmed to shut down, the default personality takes over and returns to me. I repair him, cover it up, alter his memory and make up whatever story I want. No one's the wiser because Connor spent most of his time alone. One of the downsides I suppose to being a living… well… _un-living_ legend."_

Allison knees buckled, sinking her to the unyielding floor as she gripped uselessly at the cage with her fingers, mouth yawning open in a silent scream.

"_For what it's worth… I have no regrets."_

The speaker clicked as the Engineer closed the channel, leaving Allison a broken pile in the corner of the lift as the power returned to the carriage and it began descending once more, back toward the causeway where it shuddered to a stop, the power dying again before the doors could open, trapping her once again.

She didn't know how long she lay there. An hour maybe. Perhaps even two. The horror looping through her again and again to the sound of the Engineer's voice.

It felt like forever.

"For as long as I can remember, Ally… I've had a dream of a better world." Like a wraith in the dark he was suddenly there. Her brother. The man behind the curtain. He was standing beyond the cage in a sheltered alcove out of the wind and rain, a warm parka wrapped around him that had never seen a day's work in its life.

"A world that's perfect and everything and everyone has a place and purpose. No _war_, no _crime_, no _petty jealousies_. No one in a wrong occupation or a wrong life. A _paradise_ where everything is unified and harmonious. _Clockwork_."

He studied the palm of his hand as she gazed up at him, only feet away, the urge to kill broken out of her as he loomed over her like a god.

"It could never have happened in the old world. That place was too tainted, too far down the path of no return to ever have its destiny rewritten." He leaned towards her, earnestness in his eyes. "But that's all changed now. That world is gone, Connor is gone, Skynet is almost defeated, and now we have a new beginning." He smiled sweetly like a serpent.

"Now we have _you_."

She swallowed the cold lump in her throat, feeling powerless and afraid beneath the gaze of this madman. Always so well dressed and nourished, at peace in this hellish future – like he had some unearthly, Faustian power that granted strength, clairvoyance and immortality.

"With _you_ we can create a whole new race of people. People that are better than anything that has gone before. Man _or_ machine. _Faster_, _stronger_, more _intelligent_, more _civilised_. A perfect race of people to inherit a perfect world they are tailored to. Ones that don't need protection from radiation or the cold. Need less food and comfort. Can cooperate with one another for the greater whole. A _superior race_."

She stared at him, seeing her brother for the first time, realising only now what had been germinating in her midst for all those long years. It was at once so obvious and a revelation, simple in its tangled web of deranged psychology.

"You're _insane_…" She breathed. "You're not a genius or a saviour… you're a _madman_."

He smiled a Cheshire grin, teeth a perfect crescent of unnatural white. "One world's madman is another's saviour. And from this moment on, I'll be the one writing history. The choice is yours."

Without another word he slipped back into the shadows, leaving Allison frozen in the dark before power came back to the elevator, its old mechanics grinding as the doors screeching open like the gateway to hell.

Allison stepped out onto the causeway, gripping the railing with her hand as she stumbled aimlessly, wandering wherever as the world span. It didn't matter where she went, so long as she kept moving. She looked down through the metal grating to the ocean beneath, its abyssal waves rising and squalling with unstoppable power.

She stopped dead as shapes moved ahead of her in the darkness. Shifting shadows of mechanised death. Clinging in a group along the narrow catwalk as their red eyes leered at her from the shadows. She turned and went to go the other way, coming up against the terminator-imposter leading another horde of metallic demons from the other direction, trapping her between them to block any escape.

Her eyes drifted down her metal arm to the railing, out onto the ocean and the vista of black, knowing in that instant the only course left open to her. The last choice she could make that wasn't bound by hidden programming or the inevitability of the Engineers' machinations.

_This_ was the end of the line.

With robotic motion she scaled the barrier, slipping her legs over until she hung by her hands and heels on the other side, staring down into the darkness as the ocean roared beneath her.

In that moment she could feel them right behind her. Red-eyed demons. Her brothers' minions.

She shivered with fear as she turned to look, coming face to face with their leader, the imposter, the one that was once her love as it stood a few feet away, the hideous forms and gleam of metal a demonic army behind him, more lethal and inhuman than anything she had imagined.

Slowly he reached out his hand to her, palm upturned and gentle, beckoning her from the ledge to join him. Join _them_. Be one with the machines and embrace what she had become, making her a silent promise of a new life and a new world. A _machine-Eden_. A paradise where she would be a goddess and a queen. The _Eve_ to his _Adam_. The progenitors of a master race to the architecture of the Engineer's dystopian vision.

A smile spread across her face, the way ahead never more right or clear as she turned away to face oblivion, spreading her arms like wings as she made a silent prayer, pivoted forward, and plunged headlong over the edge.

She fell downward towards the abyss, falling forever in an eternal moment. A moment of ecstasy. A moment of triumph. Knowing she had resisted to the very end and would see her John again.

Then, as her body plunged into the dark and indomitable waters, Allison Young disappeared forever.

####

A trembling finger reached out and switched off the computer screen, lifting the crystal glass and downing the whiskey in a single mouthful of bitter success. The Engineer took a calming breath as the liquid warmed his being, carefully stubbing out the end of his cigarillo in a nearby ashtray until it extinguished, saving what was left for later as he tucked it back in its case.

"She did it." He said, slipping the case into his jacket pocket as he turned around to his master. "It's done."

In a darkened alcove at the back of the cavernous room, a figure sat silently in the shadows, watching him with murderous eyes. A hand braced the side of its face, thumb beneath its chin and finger probing its temple before it leaned forward from the dark.

"Deploy Hydrobots to retrieve her. Place the body in the lab." The man's voice was low and deadly, at once calm and serene as it perched on a blade between pragmatic magnanimity and biblical fury.

The doctor nodded his obedience, his former irreverence shattered after a recent berating where he was confronted with firm evidence of his disloyalty – a red-tinged video filmed from an obscure angle of himself and General Perry, thick as thieves, discussing plans and strategy beyond their authority or purview.

The general in question stood nearby, next to the seated figure like a reproved Doberman, stiff and to attention after his actions where laid bare, his intentions questioned, before finally receiving swift discipline.

The Engineer had not been so fortunate. Neither civilian nor military, he was not subject to the same court of judgement, but had received sentence all the same – forced to act out that horrific display for his sister's benefit and to drive her over the edge to the precise instruction of the man before him.

"Get the hell out of my sight. _Both_ of you."

Without a word or protest, the cowed forms of Daniel Phillips and General Perry silently left the room, sliding the door shut behind them with a whining groan and leaving the real John Connor alone with his thoughts.

####

Andrew Falcheck groaned as he tried to open his eyes, pealing the lids back carefully as his lashes were plucked out, struck to a layer of ice and congealed blood that had frozen to his face. He could not feel anything below his neck, his body dead and without feeling, like he had been paralysed.

He put his eyes around the place, peering as best he could through the narrow slits to the place he had been brought to, recognising it immediately as _Longyearbyen's_ little supermarket down the street from the bar, the place he had plundered earlier that day for his bounty of haricot beans.

He was propped up in one of the aisles, his back against an old chest refrigerator in the meat section, legs outstretched on the dirty vinyl floor as his arms lay loose beside him. Other than himself, there was no one else around.

He breathed a sigh of blessed relief, wanting to crawl over to his knees and pray his thankfulness or cry to himself like a baby. Maybe he would live through this after all. Maybe he would see home again.

Maybe _it_ had forgotten about him and had gone after Reese instead. He prayed that it was so.

Suddenly there was movement to his left, sensing it rather than seeing it. With some difficulty he tried to turn around, struggling against his frozen flesh to face down the darkened aisle.

Something was prowling towards him.

He felt his lungs quiver as he struggled to move, managing only a brief spasm of useless limbs.

Something huge was loping towards him on four legs, then sometimes two, alternating between the postures like a thing trapped somewhere between man, machine and animal.

Then suddenly the thing was there, right next to him, rising over him higher than he could see before it leaned down and stared at him nose-to-nose. The pungent smell of carrion assaulted his senses and his breath caught in his throat, his body trembling with abject terror as the Monster gazed into his eyes.

A moment passed as they regarded one another.

Then it leaned in, jaws and moist breath enveloping the pilot before they snapped closed like a bear trap, crunching through bone and flesh in a single movement and severing the man in half.

* * *

_Please read and review._


	8. Chapter 8

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 8  
****T.R. Samuels**

Frozen wilderness and tearing wind bound him in every direction. There was a mountain of bare rock and snow to the south, ocean between the west and the east, stranding him on a plate of earth that tailed from the base of the mountain for over half a mile. It was longer than he could see, even during the day, a good couple of miles at least, the perfect area for the enclave's former inhabitants to build an airport and runway to reach the outside world.

Reese held his rifle tighter as his grip waned in the fierce wind, snow driving into him like wall of knifes as he pulled the neck of his parka tighter and glared through his ski goggles. The storm was really picking up now. Wind and snow tore sideways across the white landscape, illuminated in an eerie glow by the light of the full moon as it shone like a giant white pearl between a veil of angry clouds.

He should have told Connor to stick it.

_No._ That was the cold and exhaustion talking. He should have said, 'thank you very much for the plum assignment General Connor, I appreciate it, but I'd prefer to remain at my post'.

In fact, that's _exactly_ what he should have said. He could have handled that. No problem. Defending Serrano Point from terminator incursions and running recon on enemy positions would have been a day at the beach next to this.

Reese slipped on a block of invisible ice and went flying, falling flat on his back in a pile of splayed limbs as the air was knocked out of him, the rifle clattering off into the snow. He growled as the pain reverberated up his spine, the sound snatched off in the roaring wind as he gazed up into the turbulent sky.

'_Just come and pick us up you bunch of Squids.'_

No one was coming though. It would be days before the _Charybdis_ would consider them overdue, even with the lack of radio contact. They'd just assume it was the storm blocking communications and wait until the weather lifted before trying to make contact, let alone think about sending another team. By then it would too late.

With huge effort Reese found his legs again, hauling his bruised and battered carcass from the ground and dragging his rifle from the snow, checking it over in case anything had been damaged. It looked fine. It looked a lot better than he felt. Ever since he got here he'd been in a helicopter crash, been thrown through a window by a killer robot, trudged miles across country in arctic conditions and had the crap scared out of him. Add to that being constantly froze, hungry and thoroughly exhausted and his tortured body was about ready to call it a day.

If what Steve said was true though, that might be sooner rather than later.

Ahead of him lay the remains of the airfield hanger, a giant barn of a building that seemed relatively intact save for a few areas of structural collapse. A part of the roof had caved in and some of the walls looked ready to come down, but aside from that, the steel frame skeleton looked remarkably sturdy.

He made his way around the perimeter, looking for a way in, the colossal main doors an immovable barrier. The block and concrete walls felt eternal in length as he trudged through the dark over ice that had accrued up its surface and piles of broken asphalt, crushed and forced upwards into mounds by the relentless cycle of frost and thaw over the intermitting years of abandonment.

A stone's throw away, running parallel with the edge of the hanger, was a forest of gnarly seracs; huge blocks of ice the size of cars and houses leading off toward the ocean's edge like a nightmare labyrinth caved through the ice and snow.

Reese didn't even want to gaze in that direction.

Eventually he stumbled upon what remained of another fire exit, almost walking right by it in the darkness of his fading torch and the snow that kept covering his goggles. He slung the rifle around his shoulder and gave the door a good shove, hoping it was as perished as the one on the terminal. No such luck.

The door was solid as a rock, looking to Reese like a fire door and at least a solid inch of timber and fire retardant resin designed to keep flames contained, its form frozen in place by a berm of ice that locked it tight into the frame. Even the cracks around it were packed with ice, at least a decades worth, shot-blasted by driving storms until a layer of impenetrable crystal covered everything.

'_This place is locked tighter than my ass. Time to get creative.'_

Reese took a few steps back, ignoring his unease as he turned his back to the serac forest, flicking the safety on the rifle and planting his feet firmly in the snow before taking aim and switching it to automatic. Bullets wouldn't do him much good anyway. Not against Steve. Not against… _whatever_. He wished he'd brought a plasma rifle, but even a single unit would have been too precious to deprive from the frontlines for such a low-level mission – or so his platoon lieutenant had informed him.

He let out a wearied breath and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle burst to life, spitting a hailstorm of fire as Reese cut a horizontal swath across the width of the door, curling the stream down across its surface until the timber barrier was torn to splinters and the magazine clicked empty. Smoke trailed from the barrel as Reese approached his handiwork, satisfied as he kicked in the last tendrils of wood that still clung in place, widening the opening until it was big enough for him to duck inside the awaiting cavern.

The hanger had been everything he imagined. Dark, ancient and mysterious. Had been so for over fifteen years, sealed in the days after the bombs fell. A tomb where things came to die that stank of kerosene, old oil and the furry musk of stagnation. Reaching inside his jacket, he pulled out a flare, cracking it alight with a deft strike and illuminating the hanger innards in the acid green of chemical flame.

There before him, looming out of the dark in the sudden brightness lay the ruined hulk of a jet airliner. Huge and monstrous like a beached whale at night. Just like Steve had described and unlike any aircraft Reese had ever seen.

The tubular fuselage was all that predominantly remained. The rest had been destroyed. It now lay on its belly, wings snapped off and lying flat on the floor, draped across a pair of ruined engines. The landing gear was crushed beneath it and the once proud tail hung limply like a scolded dog's.

Reese felt a flicker of hope to burn within him. Maybe he'd see home yet.

In no time he found one of the passenger doors, casting the light over it and finding a set of tracks in the snow. His guts tightened for a moment, but fortunately these were not the monstrous imprints of some nameless beast, but the heavy prints of a T-888. Reese recognised the size and depth, trained to look for such things. Steve had definitely been through here and the aircraft's door had been opened recently, the dusting of ice across its surface grooved with finger marks and smudges.

He reached out and pressed the release catch, having to push firmly against the weathered mechanism until it sprang open, allowing him to twist the handle until the locks gave way with a clunk. He pulled hard, both arms straining as he heaved on the meaty airlock until it finally swung open, groaning on a pair of gigantic rusty hinges.

Ever ready for trouble in this place, Reese tossed the flare on the ground and looked inside the aircraft along the length of his rifle, stepping up onto the cabin deck and shining the torch down the aisle. Nothing moved inside, the crafts' innards a cobwebbed coffin of dusty chairs, deployed oxygen masks and an overturned trolley, the only sign of life the footprints that proceeded down the aircraft toward the cockpit.

Steve's story was ringing truer by the minute and Reese felt the imminence of success loom large ahead.

The door to the flight deck was already kicked in, the security lock long corroded anyway and allowing him inside to what was once the nerve centre of the entire aircraft, now nothing more than a stale compartment filled with shot electronics and flight equipment, a million and one automated systems designed to keep this hundred ton mesh of metal, glass and carbon-fibre flying thousands of feet through the sky. Reese wondered idly if this was one of the ones Carter had told him about that could fly and land by itself, only needing a human pilot in case of emergency.

He moved into the compartment and brushed his glove across the layer of dust on a strong box built into the wall, finding words like '_emergency'_ and '_rescue'_ the only things legible before he yanked it open.

His breath caught in his throat.

"Result!"

Sitting there in a slot carved for it from white polystyrene was exactly what he had been looking for. The distress radio beacon. _Hope. Salvation._ A little rectangular amalgamation of yellow plastic, black rubber and hardened electronics that with a little juice would be their ticket off this miserable rock. He pulled the device from the case with a rubber squeal and slipped it inside his jacket, zipping it up before he promptly made his way back down the passenger cabin. This was no place to linger.

He ejected the rifle's spent magazine and slipped in a new one. Only two left now. But as he'd already concluded, it wouldn't make much difference now anyway. The grenades were the only real weapon he had. If this '_Monster'_, as Steve called it, was mostly flesh, then maybe they'd be more effective against it than a terminator. He made a mental note to question the machine on it in more detail when he returned as he neared the open hatch where the ray of acidic green flooding in from the burning flare.

A shadow moved across the light.

Reese froze on the spot, legs hanging mid-stride, bodyweight balancing on the ball of his foot. For a long moment he stood rooted in place, transfixed, motionless, holding his breath and staring daggers at the obscured doorway a few feet away on his left. The flare continued to flickering outside, beyond the angle of his vision, the light uninterrupted by the shifting of shadows.

He _knew_ he'd seen something.

Blood thundered in his ears as very slowly, Reese slipped his hand under the rifle, taking a firm grip of the grenade launcher's trigger as quietly as he could before lifting the weapon at the ready, slipping the safety off and killing the torch.

He crept silently along the aisle, glancing toward the portholes as the rumbling of the distant storm seemed to lose its frenzy, dying to almost silence until the only sound was the hiss of the flare.

Reese froze as a shadow slid past again. Slower this time. Blatant and unafraid. Waiting for him.

'_Shit.'_

This was it. Whatever got the others had now come for him. Ready for seconds.

'_Don't fucking count on it!'_

Reese reached the side of the door, stealing himself for a few seconds as his jaw set taut, emotion flat-lining as his training and honed instincts took hold and convinced him with every fibre of their being that he was the baddest motherfucker that ever lived. He was Death Incarnate. A Ninja. John Connor on a Monday. Terminators would shit bullets at the sight of him; and right now, whatever was out there waiting in the dark, was about to have 'owned' redefined.

Reese snapped on the torch and swung out of the hatch, wide-eyed and frosty, landing square on the snow covered concrete and swung the rifle in every direction with hydraulic speed and precision.

Nothing was there.

'_What the…?'_

He definitely hadn't imagined it. Had he? _Something_ was alive out here and it wasn't leaving this place that way.

For dashing seconds he twitched about, looking everywhere into the black for a target. A shadow. A silhouette. Movement. Anything that didn't belong. But there was nothing.

He smirked with palpable relief as he came down off his adrenaline.

'_You're getting jumpy in your old age, Reese.'_

The Monster lowered its head in front of his face, hanging upside down from above him as it leaned out from the roof of the fuselage.

Whatever contrived bravado Reese had mustered drained warmly down his inner thigh. His blood turned to ice and he began trembling in abject terror as the thing peered into him with a pair of lidless, obsidian eyes the size of baseballs.

It blinked as it looked him up and down, sizing him up with the starving fascination the wolf had for the lost lamb.

He swallowed hard and the thing suddenly changed its expression, barring its teeth in a hissing snarl and went to strike.

Reese flung himself to the floor, rolled over and aimed high, pulling both triggers of the rifle.

The roof of the fuselage was torn apart as a stream of armour piercing bullets and a shrieking grenade blew it to smithereens, sending carbon-fibre shrapnel in every direction as the Monster leapt away like a wraith. It moved as fast as Reese could see, dodging through the black with balletic grace as he followed it through the strobes of gunfire beyond the green halo of light.

He snapped open the launcher, the spent cartridge flipping free as he dug another from his bandoleer, jamming it awkwardly into the loader and rolled up onto his feet. By the time he was ready, the thing was gone.

'_It's _not_ gone.'_

Reese spun at every sound, shinning the dying torch into the darkness as the flare began to fizzle, the safe halo shrinking by inches.

He couldn't see it, but he could hear it out there. Breathing. Moving. Faster than any human or machine could move as it circled him in the dark.

The light of the torch faded into nothing.

"Don't you fucking dare!" Reese banged it with his palm, conjuring a momentary flicker, but the battery was dead. He glanced down to the flare, the last remnants of chemical fuel spitting from the end like a Roman candle.

He fumbled inside his jacket for another, struggling in the last bursts of light and pulled out several my accident, spilling them on the ground as the light finally died and he was left in total darkness.

His breath came in panicky gasps, heart pounding like a jackhammer as he fumbled through the snow, seizing one of the flares and tried to light it. It was impossible with one hand and he quickly dropped his weapon, seizing the stick and going by memory through the striking procedure until the end ignited and acid green flooded his eyes.

Reese nearly jumped out of his skin as the Monster was revealed. Right in front of him. A mouth of triangular, shark-like teeth glistening in its open mouth as the light reflected in its eyes.

He went for the rifle. The thing slapped a giant paw down on top of it, shoving him with its other with a pneumatic jab that flung him off his feet and smacked him into the side of the fuselage. He dropped into a heap and something inside him cracked, eliciting a wail of agony.

The thing loomed up before the burning light as he shuffled back against the plane, eyes filling for the first time with the full form of the Monster in all its hellish glory.

For a moment, Reese wasn't even sure what he was looking at. It was like no terminator he had ever seen. More primate than human. For a moment he thought it was a bear, like the ones Carter had described – but that thought was banished when he saw its size.

The Monster was as big as a pickup truck, had shoulders just as wide that rippled with mountains of colossal muscle. Its body was covered in a thick white fur that stank like wet dog, one that had been dead for a week and the front of its tanklike chest was smeared with some blackened substance that Reese knew instinctively was blood. Gallons of it, dribbling down from its enormous mouth.

The head was the most striking of all. Bent and repurposed. Huge eyes that were jet-black and lidless – entranced in an eternal, bone-chilling stare. The mouth was as wide as a car hood, swathed in a Glasgow smile that drew back to reveal more teeth than Reese had ever seen – jagged triangles of ceramic like the shards of a broken dish-set.

Suddenly it reared up on its hind legs, the arms reaching past its knees where the fingers chinked with claws, each as long as Reese's forearm, curling swaths into the snow as they dragged on the floor. In a flash, Reese remembered the tracks he had found outside the township, the racking lines between the prints and how he wondered what had made them.

Now he knew.

The Monster rushed at him, bounding forward with the force of a freight train. Forelegs sprang out and the claws sank into the plane's fuselage like cardboard, pinning both his arms between the spindly bones as it breathed over him, the smell an unbearable foulness as it gazed lovingly upon its next victim.

Slithering from between the teeth a blooded tongue coiled out, running its length up his chest and the side of his face as Reese cowered away, pressing himself into the plane. He turned to it when it had finished, defiance flaring as he summoned his courage and snorted as hard as he could, drawing as much mucus as possible from his nasal cavity and spat it in the creature's face.

The creature winced as the spray covered it face. Then a sound like a distant tidal wave rumbled up from its gullet, snarling at Reese before it took one last look down his body before tearing him limb from limb.

Reese closed his eyes and thought of Sarah, whispering her name with his dying breath and pictured her face before the end.

But it didn't happen.

He parted his lids slowly and saw the Monster gazing down at his chest, studying something carefully before it looked back up, reflecting the soldier's face in each of the eyes. The head twitched to the side, something changing deep within the jaguar orbs. A recalculation. A change of plan. For a moment, Reese even thought that it smiled.

Then with a parting growl it retracted its claws, metal screeching from within the plane as it released Reese from its death grip and leapt over him, disappearing into the darkness and out into the storm.

For minutes, Reese sat in stunned silence and a pool of sweat and saliva, dithering as the cold chilled his moist skin, trying to understand what had happened without feeling ungracious. He looked down his chest, reaching with a shaky hand to where the Monster had been looking, amidst the pockets of his bandolier and combat vest, retrieving the bright yellow radio beacon from where it jutted out between the zip of his jacket.

The flame spluttered out from the second flare and everything faded to black.

####

"Okay…" Major General Perry released a haggard breath, pinching the bridge of his nose against an ensuing headache. "At the risk of sounding stupid, I need this all explained to me. From the top, until it makes sense." He looked over at the Engineer as the scientist slouched by a window, retrieving the half-spent cigarillo from its silver case.

"What the _hell_ has been going on here?!"

Phillips didn't respond. He reached into his jacket and retrieved a cigar-cutter from behind a leather notepad, snipping off the burnt end of the tobacco stick with a shift clip. He placed it between his teeth and lit up until his head was orbited by a smoky nebula, taking a long drag as he gazed through the rectangle of one-way mirror.

On the other side of the length of glass lay a white laboratory that redefined the concept of sterility. Bright white, smooth lines and impermeable. At its centre the body of Allison Young lay in state on the altar of a metal platform that looked like a cross between an operating table and a giant gyroscope, surrounded by an array of robotic arms that hung from a central shaft on the ceiling. Terminators moved about inside, working and monitoring the equipment, ones sheathed in human tissue and lab coats and where intended for a specific purpose. The machines that reprogrammed machines.

Over the body stood the John Connor imposter. Stiff and sentinel. Guarding her with its life. It the dragon and she the Golden Fleece, gazing her up and down in some machine-fascination.

"Do you want the long or the short version?"

Perry turned to the scientist, convinced he'd been ignored. "Let's try the short."

Phillips smiled sadly, for once the arrogance sidelined for something else. A special kind of masochism as his eyes stayed glued to the ashen body. "We wanted to meet the _real_ Allison Young."

Perry's gaze slid sideways and his brow wrinkled. "_What?_"

Phillips retrieved the cigarillo from his mouth, twirling it between his finger and thumb before turning towards the general.

"There was the guy. Before my time. _Marcus Wright_." He sounded different. Like the wind had gone out of his sails, the usual indefinable accent replaced by something easier and casual to the ears. Perry knew stress when he heard it. The pretentions were gone now. No more bullshit. Phillips was hurt and his armour was beginning to chink.

"He thought he was human, but he wasn't. Not after Skynet changed him." He took a hit from the roll. "But he was still human inside, y'know. It didn't get his consciousness or his…"

"_Soul_?"

Phillips clicked his fingers and pointed at him, the irreverence back for a cameo. "Yeah, that vestigial word I don't believe in."

"And… you figured she was the same?"

Smoke plumbed in fluffy white curls as Phillips did his best impression of a smokestack, smoking the cigar for all it was worth like it was going out of style, ignoring Perry's gaze as the general thought about it for a moment and it all suddenly clicked.

"You made it all up! The whole thing!" He sounded trapped somewhere between awe and outrage. "The torture? The interrogation? Letting her think she escaped and that she killed Connor? That bullshit about a machine-future and him being dead! You both staged it just to push her over the edge… so she'd kill herself?"

Phillips gave no expression as he continued to smoke.

"We needed to know if she was really telling the truth. There's no test to determine that. Not _really_. You can't measure someone's loyalty with… a _machine_. Only by what they do."

The distant whine of old metal signalled the approach of another, the heavy door slamming shut behind him as footsteps staccatoed their way towards them like a coming storm. Perry's voice dropped several octaves for fear of being heard, the desire for an answer outweighing his rising anxiety as he cashed in the last few seconds he had with the Engineer before they were separated forever.

_Compartmentalised_ for their own good, according to Connor.

"And just how the hell does jumping off a rig into a frozen ocean prove she was who she said she was?!"

Phillips breathed out, turning to him out of the smoke with a learned patience no other man would no, cigar cupped in an upturned hand as he gave him an angsty smile and the simplest, most obvious answer in the world.

"_Terminators_ can't self-terminate."

The door to the anteroom swung open and Connor strode inside. Perry clicked his heals and made a smart salute, Phillips carried on smoking as he drifted back to the window.

"Your orders," Connor thrust a sealed manila envelope towards Perry. "The chopper's waiting to take you back to Serrano. I'll meet you there in a month. Good hunting, general."

It was as amicable a dismissal as Perry could expect. Connor was still pissed as hell and it blazed silently in his eyes. Perry took it gratefully, knowing it could have been a hell of a lot worse as he tucked the envelope under his arm and beat a hasty departure. He didn't turn back to wish his one-time co-conspirator farewell, and now never would. It was the last time he ever saw him.

As the door clunked shut, Connor and Phillips eyed one another over the tendrils of smoke.

"Gonna tell _me_ to piss off now, big guy?"

"I'd rather make you."

They stared one another down again in silence.

Connor looked completely unfazed, like he was waiting in line for at a library. Phillips took a leisurely puff from the cigar, the thin roll of russet finally smouldering to a stump, the heavy wisps of smoke mingling like spirits in the still air as he leant against the window frame like a man at a bar.

"She was your sister. I'm sympathetic to that. So for now you're off the hook."

Connor turned to leave, no longer interested in fighting as he glanced through the glass to the pale laboratory. He had more important things to do than waste these last precious moments on Daniel Phillips. He went to enter the lab.

"'Off the hook', huh? That makes me wonder…" Phillips began, halting him in the doorway. There was no way he'd let this slide without saying something. "What'll you give me for the life of my _other_ sister?"

John felt fury ride in on a slab of sympathy through the armour of his contempt. He sighed and released the handle. "I _am_ sorry you lost your sister, Daniel."

"You should never have gotten involved." Phillips' voice was a spit of venom, changing on him like the wind. It felt like a head-on attack and for a moment caught Connor off guard. Phillips rarely did direct, it was always a game of chess with him. Not today though.

"If she hadn't been with you, the machines would never have taken her."

Connor turned to him, anger tempered only by the guilt that grew within him in waves. "If there's something you want to say to me, grow a pair and say it!"

Phillips snatched the invitation.

"It's your fault! You got my sister killed!" He pointed a gangly finger at him over the cigar. "_You_."

Connor shook his head, disgusted with this man as much as himself as the words rang with ugly truth. Neither of them was a saint. "It's a shame you never showed such gallantry when she was alive. She'd probably have appreciated it, despite what a bastard she thought you were."

The light went out of Phillips' eyes like a dying candle, replaced by something dark and menacing, a part of himself he kept hidden from prying eyes. Connor had always known it was there but this was the first time he had seen it. The _real_ Daniel Phillips. He placed his spent cigar down on the window ledge and turned to him, face black as night as the two adversaries squared off to one another.

It was time to finally settle this.

"Do you have the slightest comprehension how badly I want you dead?"

If it had been any other man, Connor would have blown his brains out. No judge. No jury. Those things didn't exist anymore. He'd have done it in a town square with the whole world watching. He _had_ done it. Dissent was the one thing he could never, _would_ never tolerate. But his hands where tied.

Maybe that was why he despised Phillips so much, and he him. Despite whatever ill feelings and mutual loathing coexisted between them – they needed one another. The Resistance couldn't survive without his technical skills, nor could it win the war without Connor's genius. Phillips kept them in the game; Connor played it. That was the way of things and that's how it worked. He needed Phillips and Phillips needed him, bound together and lumbered with one another until the end.

To destroy that winning formula would be suicide and they knew it. A fate that felt like a straightjacket.

He knew he should take some comfort in that. That would be the logical and reasonable thing to do. Phillips _was_ part of the Resistance. He fought the good fight. Maybe the Machiavellian scientist couldn't be all that bad.

The thought only made the flames of contempt leap higher.

"One way or the other… when Skynet isn't an issue anymore… there's going to be a reckoning between us." Phillips retrieved his stubbly cigar, glaring at Connor between narrow lids and not giving a shit as he walked past the general and ambled leisurely towards the exit.

"So when should I expect the knife in my back?"

The scientist turned, lab coat spinning around his waist like a cape as he stood tall in the open doorway. He shrugged his shoulders, pocketing the cigar stub with mutinous glint and a Cheshire smile. "Time will tell."

Connor felt the corners of his mouth curl, a derisive puff of air hissing out of him in an aborted chuckle. It made Phillips frown.

"Yeah…" His eyes glazed to the apocalypse of what lay ahead – the incredible machine Skynet would create to try and destroy him. He had imagined it so many times in his dreams, rehearsed the moment of destiny when he would behold its dreadful magnificence and order his father on one last mission, ensure his existence and tie it forever to that of his nemesis.

He looked at the Engineer with sage appraisal. "It always does."

He watched as Phillips gave one last look towards the window before turning on his heel, cutting himself off from it the way only he could before stepping over the threshold, swung the door closed, and headed off into the facility.

For a long while, Connor sat and waited in the anteroom. Centring himself for what was to come. Exorcising the anger and ill feeling generated in his confrontation with the Engineer. Over the last few days he had suffered through disbelief, through denial, through anger and at length through final acceptance. Every stage of grief. He had grieved for the woman he had known and loved and had already lost. Lost before he had even known she was gone if he could admit the truth. But that was still too painful.

Skynet had made her so perfect. Utterly without flaw, inside and out. How could it have done that if she were not truly Allison in every way that mattered? Had the same thoughts and feelings and memories. In the end, was there a difference?

But that was just sentiment. Just _feeling_. What room was there for feelings in what he did? Rage flared in him as another part of his humanity detached. He was John Connor. Prophesised leader of humanity and the Resistance. More than flesh. More than man. More than human. He had a war to fight and a destiny to fulfil. He could never lose sight of what was necessary over what was not in the grand design that was his life – a fleeting moment in the vastness of eternity meant to decide only one thing;

Whether humanity survived, or if it was obliterated.

The laboratory beyond the door was one of the most precious facilities in the entire Resistance armoury. It had taken years to build, acquiring technology and equipment that only Skynet now produced, but finally it was assembled. A cleanroom designed with singular vision and purpose he had thought about since he was a boy and gazed up at his new terminator uncle – the reprogramming and reconstruction of captured terminators.

Air hissed around him as he broke the seal, feeling the higher pressure inside the tiny airlock escape before the door slid shut behind him. The chamber went through its automatic preamble, removing whatever dust and static or other contaminants he'd brought with him before allowing him entrance.

The inside of the lab was crisp and stale, the impermeable floor, walls and ceiling cleaner than an embassy dinner plate. He forwent the usual mask and overshoes and headed right in, the coverall clad machines turning to glance in his direction with silent disapproval, like he was stinking up the place. None though made mention of it.

Silently he drifted up to the side of his machine-double like a rudderless wreck, one that refused to sink but felt unseaworthy all the same. He loomed up to the table and braced his fingers against the edge, holding it together the way he always had by detachment and compartmentalisation, cutting off his feelings until the job was done.

"Thank you for your help." He turned to the silent sentinel. "We couldn't have done it without you."

His doppelganger turned to him, mirroring him with robotic motion as its head twitched like a sparrow, looking into him with an arctic detachment that put his dispassion to shame.

"You're welcome."

In a flinch of liquid motion the figure morphed into shimmering chrome, all detail and features blending out across its surface as it began to collapse in on itself, shrinking at least a foot as the body reformed into someone else. The lines of new features and clothing began to emerge, taking shape like a ferrofluid sculpture, the slender form of a woman emerging from the mannequin of liquid metal.

Once it had taken shape, colour swept across its surface in a burst of pigment, the icing on the illusion as it turned to him with cold blue eyes. The form was of a woman he had never known, plucked from a Skynet database or generated by preference, the avatar chosen by the rouge machine he crossed paths with from time to time. Her clothing was impossibly neat, trim and functional, hair immaculate, cherry lips, skin tone soft and even and perfect in every light. An airbrushing made flesh.

"My debt to you is repaid," It said, the melodious voice entirely different. A Siren song that was just as deadly. "Did you get what you needed?" She sounded almost petulant, like a cat forced to do tricks against its nature.

Connors's expression changed ever so slightly, paling under his aura of diplomacy as he felt anything but an ambassador. "I got enough. Now I need your help again."

She gave him a sharp look, the one that spelled danger in a split second, looking as likely to impaling him through his ribs as even speak to him.

"We're even." She said curtly. "You helped me, I helped you. Our relationship is terminated."

She went to leave, making it halfway to the door before Connor spoke. "If you help me again I'll be indebted to _you_. It's cold out there. You never know when you'll need help." At another time he might have tried to recruit her, bringing her onboard with the Resistance for the big win with the promise of a future he gave all the machines. But now wasn't the time. He didn't have it in him and there was only one thing he cared about now.

"I need your help to reprogram her."

She turned to him on a dagger heel, eyes unblinking like a shark. "Why?"

"She's not like any machine I've ever reprogrammed before. I don't want to make any mistakes." He swallowed against the sore lump in his throat. "And I don't want to risk losing what makes her so different. She's too precious to destroy completely."

The liquid machine stepped back to him, gazing down at the pale body with a trace of immature envy. "She's not the person you knew. She may have been truthful in her convictions, but she was only a copy. Why imbue your emotion to such a meaningless thing?"

He could have tried to explain it. Laid it all out and tried to make her understand. But there was no 'write' switch for a T-1000.

"Because I love her." He said simply. The pain of it sliced through him like a blade. "And if there's any way I can save even a part of her, then I want to try."

The machine looked at him, then to her, the mystery of the human condition strange and unnerving amidst a fortress of these vicious, bipedal creatures. But _this_ human was often right. She didn't understand and she didn't care too. She wasn't human. She was _never_ human. She could accept not understanding and move on from such irrelevance. A part of him envied that.

"The unit has suffered a total systems crash due to a metaphysical dichotomy and is unrecoverable. She cannot be reinitialised in her previous state. The only option is to erase her memory and reengineer her CPU architecture so that she is no longer bound by her core programming." She turned to look at her. "For all intents and purposes she will be a completely different individual. She won't be your 'Allison' anymore."

He hardened his heart like he'd done a million times. "I understand." The words felt like a goodbye. "Can you give me a few minutes before we start?"

She twitched her head, face plain as ever before walking away without a word, hips moving like a metronome before she slid from the room with the other machines as he dismissed them, the door closing behind them with a hiss of sealed pressure.

Then he just tried to breathe, the grief hitting him like bullet, tearing his heart to pieces as it burnt cold in his chest.

He turned to her, feeling her body's presence like a singularity, drawing him in until there was no escape. His armour crumpled in an instant, leaving him bare as he slid his hand along her forearm, slipping his hand over hers.

"I've said goodbye to so many people…. so many people I've loved…" He looked on her peaceful expression. "So much death and suffering…" He chuckled sickly as a tear rolled down his cheek. "I've done it all a thousand times and I still don't know what to say."

He gripped her hand tighter, feeling the precipice of his feelings open beneath him and the crushing anguish flood in, calling him down into the abyss as the walls he had built over so many years began buckling beneath the weight. Already the world seemed darker, the future bleak and cruel. A lonely, desolate road he'd always known he would be left to walk alone.

_No fate._

No fate but what we make for ourselves. He used to believe that.

His whole life had been written by fate. His conception, his life, his very existence. His destiny. Had there ever been any escape?

A lifetime being prepared for what lay ahead. The training. The mantras. The harsh discipline. How his mother had told him everything and tried to help him, preparing him as best she could. For his _destiny_. Then ten years trapped inside a loveless marriage. And for what? More _destiny_. Ordained by the hand of fate before either of them had even existed.

Allison had been freedom. Air to breath. Escape from the path laid out for him. The choice he had always wanted to make for himself. Until she had fallen into his life he had just been a clock ticking. An actor reading a script written by someone else.

And now she was lying here on a cold metal slab. The life cut from her in a savage stroke.

He'd killed her. As sure as he had pulled the trigger himself. Her association with him had been her death sentence the moment Skynet had learnt of it.

He'd known something was wrong. He'd been waiting for her amidst the tunnels, the place they met all the time, outside Serrano where no one else knew so they could be together and alone. She was stubborn like that, not wanting to leave her fellow soldiers or receive special treatment. She was in it to fight and to win, not be his comforted mistress. She was a soldier to the end.

He had waited in those tunnels for hours. Had the rehearsed words rolling in his head and the ring tucked in his pocket.

But she didn't come.

He figured she was just delayed, forced to hide or something from a Skynet patrol and she'd be there eventually. Then the possibilities flashed through his mind. Her being caught or killed, lying face down in water. Carried away in the belly of a cattle cart on the way for orderly disposal. He couldn't stop imagining those things – and then, in the end – there she was with a gun in his face and he knew it had actually happened. It was as if he had willed it.

He imagined those horrible things and it was as if he had willed it to happen.

He reached into his pocket now and took out what he had intended to give her those days ago in the tunnel. A velvet box he had found somewhere and the little band of gold he'd had specially made for her, the precious metal one of the most difficult things he had ever had to obtain.

Then with a tenderness he had never shown before, he took it from its case, the narrow band gleaming in the pale light as he slipped it over her metallic finger and took her hand in his.

"Maybe we could have been happy…" He trembled on his last emotional thread. "In another life…"

The walls finally fell, the world around him falling away as his body shook with final anguish, like he'd been born again, feelings flooding back into a soul long denied as he sank down over her chest, letting it drown as he cried outright and openly for the first time in thirty years.

####

Steve the terminator sat staring at the ambers of the dying campfire as they smouldered in the metal bucket, the surface charred and bent under the heat that had almost gone. He could feel the ambient temperature drop around him where he sat open and exposed on the chair, his endoskeleton responding with an infiltration program designed to activate under conditions such as these.

He began to shiver.

Skynet had given him numerous programs such as this to help him blend in. Shivering was one of them. Resistance fighters were often cold, especially at night when they huddled together in their camps and around fires such as this. If he also displayed signs of discomfort like them, then it was just one more way to prove that he was not a machine.

But Steve _was_ a machine and he felt no discomfort, ignoring the involuntary movement as he watched Private Holden rouse from his fitful slumber and reach for the pile of fuel, tossing it awkwardly into the dustbin to rekindle the waning flames. He made it look like the most arduous task ever undertook by man, limbs flaying drunkenly as he retracted them back under his blanket, eyes setting on Steve as the machine met his gaze.

"Hey." The machine remarked dryly.

Holden stared back at it, not at all comfortable with this thing nearby while he'd slept. Reese had done a _unique_ but fine job of securing it, but that didn't make him the least bit easier. Better to off the thing at their earliest convenience when the sergeant returned.

'If_ he returns.'_

Somewhere in the terminal an outer door swung open with a yawn, cold air rushing into the coffee shop in a matter of seconds before it was slammed shut with a bang that echoed up through the cavernous space of the atrium. The hair on the back of Steve's neck rose to the cold as he detected the approach of a life-form, listening as it headed their way. For a moment he became concerned until the footfalls were fully analysed.

_Bipedal locomotion._ The other human had returned.

Reese stumbled into the shop and went straight for the fire, sinking to his knees as his rifle clattered to the floor. He tore off his parka, goggles and ski-mask like he was suffocating, revealing a completion underneath so depleted that Holden had only seen the like when a terminator's living tissue had necrotised.

It had happened sometimes with the earlier 800's when they had been too badly damaged. The flesh had died and began to putrefy, turning them into zombie-like monstrosities that fooled no one, but had scared the crap out of plenty.

"You okay?!" Holden asked, watching with some concern as the sergeant dithered before the dumpy flames, throwing in more timber until it roared from the clicking aluminium like an upturned booster rocket.

"You know that stuff you said about a _Monster_?! All hungry and scary as shit?!" He breathed through barred teeth as he looked at Steve, yanking off his gloves and holding his hands up to the fire. "Well I _fucking_ believe you now!"

Holden's stomach sank and he felt a shiver go through him.

"You encountered the Monster?" Steve spoke up with a marginal frown. "It's a miracle you survived."

Reese nodded without turning, reaching for his rifle and brought it across his lap, hugging it to himself for comfort like a child with a teddy bear. His hands moved over it to free the ice that had built up on its surface, fingering the workings uselessly as he shook beyond control.

He was freaking out and he knew it. He had to calm down and get a hold of himself. They didn't have a lot of time.

"Did you retrieve the radio beacon?"

Reese felt his anger lash out. "Yeah, Steve-o! I got it!" He pulled out the device in question, the action draining him with this simple effort.

He wasn't doing well. The need for sleep and a colossal adrenaline rush were proving a lethal combination. He couldn't focus or concentrate and he was losing it. Add to that the numbing cold that cut straight to the bone and cartilage, turning muscles to rock as his belly groaned on empty.

"You will need to work quickly while I instruct you." Steve spoke up, an edge in his voice as he tried to coax him from his grotty miasma.

Reese was listening but it was no use as he looked over his blackening fingertips and thought of the intricate work that lay ahead. Finding a power source, a transformer, calculating the voltage, the amps, cutting wire, unthreading screws and bridging it all together into something that would work across continents.

It might as well be brain surgery on a trampoline.

John had taught him that it didn't matter about his body; it was his mind that would keep him alive, and right now it was on the brink. The human body had an incredible ability to take care of itself, the true battle would be fought in the mind, where brains would determine whether he lived or died.

He had to take control of the situation, get it back on track, use every resource that was available to him – not sit around waiting to feel better or for something miraculous to happen. He had to make the choice ordinarily he would never consider. He had to do something every impulse said he shouldn't. Except one. A memory of what John had said to him once;

'_Sometimes you have to put your faith in the machine.'_

The machines had no spite or ego. They were duplicitous but only did what was necessary. Only what their programming allowed them within the scope of their mission. Nothing more, nothing less. Steve's mission had been to dispose of the Monster. That was the only thing that mattered to it until the job was done.

Reese strained as he tried to remember. Something Steve had said not long after he'd first reactivated him.

'_You may be useful.'_

That's what he had said. Useful for what? _'Think!'_

In a sudden flash of neurons, clarity burst through the haze, logic clicking into place so neatly it was as if it grew there.

With a strength he never knew he had, Reese heaved himself onto unsteady legs, eyeing the terminator sternly before advancing towards him with intent, stopping as he leant on his battered rifle like a crutch.

"Your mission was to get rid of this thing. _Store_ _it_. _Whatever_. The point is Skynet knew it was dangerous and wanted it out of the world. It knew that it would be as dangerous to itself as it was to the Resistance."

Steve looked at him in silence.

"Answer me this… why do you think it let me go?"

The machine's head twitched. Calculating.

"I don't know. It was tactically unwise to do so."

Reese shook his head. "No. It knew _exactly_ what it was doing." He lifted the yellow beacon in his hand. "It took one look at _this_ and let me go. Why?"

Steve's processor tabulated, drawing in an instant the same conclusion Reese already had and his face fell in accordance.

"It _wants_ us to send a distress signal. Then it will wait for either the Resistance or Skynet to send a rescue party. It will devour the crew and use their vehicle to escape to the mainland."

A feeling sank through Reese like a cold stone, settling somewhere in his stomach as his fear was confirmed by even machine logic.

Whatever might happen to either Holden or himself, perhaps even Steve, paled in comparison to what might happen if that thing got away.

Back to the boat. Back to the world.

Skynet had certainly thought so, and that was all the confirmation he needed.

The problem didn't end there though. By now the crew on the _Charybdis_ might have grown some initiative at the lack of radio contact. Maybe even discussed the possibility of sending another team to investigate. Without forewarning, they would be flying straight into a world of hurt and give the Monster exactly what it needed.

Reese set his back teeth together and nodded firmly, the path ahead finally clear.

"No matter what happens to us, that thing can't leave here alive… and like you said… _our_ chances are a lot better."

Man and machine nodded to one another sombrely, the accord written and signed in the stoic silence of necessity and desperation. Common ground at last. Reese moved forward and knelt beneath the chair, reaching out and pulling a single wire from the wad of putty explosive before fast-peddling out of the way.

"What the fuck are you doing?!" Holden croaked, half falling off the couch as Steve was suddenly freed.

The terminator sat still for a moment before bearing down with its enormous strength, snapping the steel wire that bound its wrists with a metallic ping like it was cheap cotton twine. Then it rose out of the chair, towering over Reese by at least a foot as it grew to its maximum extent and gazed down on him from fearsome proportions.

Reese upturned his hand, the radio beacon perched on his palm as he held it up for the machine in silent challenge.

Holden gawped in horror, waiting for it to step forward and pull the sergeant's head off.

Steve glanced at it, then at Reese. Calculating. Strategising. Running the probabilities as Reese swallowed what felt like a fishing lure down his parched throat, his Adams-apple contracting beneath sinewy skin.

The machine's hand suddenly reached out – straight for him – and scooped the beacon from his hand. It frowned lightly as it looked the device over, finally nodding with laconic satisfaction and turned back to Reese with a humourless smile.

"Let's get to work then."

####

Connor watched as a large dose of heavenly amber liquid curled into his glass. Warm and aromatic. The taste of home and the world he remembered before that fateful day fifteen years ago. He ran his hand over the saffron label, red _Book Antiqua_ lettering and curly black scrawl, telling all about the brand's opulent history, its fascinating origins, method of extraction and the obligatory government warnings.

It was one of only a dozen bottles of J&B scotch left in the universe, and tonight, every last drop of it was going to be his.

As he went to lift the liquid to his parched mouth the telephone rang on his desk, shrilling with its antique bell that was a little too powerful for its own good, migrating the device across the oaken surface as it headed for the edge. Connor grabbed the receiver after contemplating whether to allow it to fall.

"What?!"

There was a slight pause. _"General Connor. This is Control."_ He recognised the voice of the T-850, one of the newest additions that he had added to _Tech-Com's _ranks a few weeks ago. John was seriously thinking about calling him Doug. _"We need you up here, sir."_

John felt his shoulders slump. "Unless the rig's under attack by a giant squid, I'm not the least bit interested. You deal with it."

"_It may be significant, sir."_

"Call me back when you've got something more definitive. I'm currently indisposed."

"_Sir, we've detected an emergency beacon transmission."_

"One of ours?"

"_No, sir. It's an older signal type. It's not on a frequency we regularly monitor, but with all the recent communication upgrades…"_

John gazed at his desk lamp through the amber nectar, swirling it round to subdue the agony of delayed gratification. "It could be anything then. Some old bunker or fallout shelter somewhere found some power and tripped the signal. Happens all the time. Ignore it."

"_Yes, sir. It's just that… I've triangulated the source of the signal and it's quite puzzling, sir."_

"Uh-huh…"

"_According to this… it's coming from a location outside the planet's habitable zone… somewhere in the far north…"_

Connor huffed, ready to slug the entire glass and spiral into a night of drunken melancholy until the penny suddenly dropped with a burst of sinking anxiety.

_Distress beacon. Far north. Svalbard._

_Kyle._

"Get the captain of the _Charybdis_ on the horn right now!" He slammed the untouched glass down with a bang and pushed out from behind the desk. "I'm on my way up."

* * *

_Sorry about the delay, but I needed to get this one right._

_Please read and review._


	9. Chapter 9

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 9  
****T.R. Samuels**

The amphibious assault carrier _Charybdis_ plunged and rose amidst the angry swells of the dark, furious water; straining against the leash of its anchor rode like an angry dog as the tumultuous Greenland Sea churned beneath it in the storm. The abyssal waves crashed into the hull with the sound of thunder, sending white spray cascading across the flight deck as the wind swept across its surface with a katabatic roar. Everywhere there was the moan of inanimate pain – timber creaking, metal groaning – all stretched to the edge of breaking point, though even beneath the onslaught of nature's fury, the old ship held firm.

_Charybdis_ was a proud and proven vessel. Forty-eight years of sailing from one end of the Earth to the other. Had crossed every ocean. Fought more battles than its present crew could remember or most had even been born for. Long before the War of the Future. Before the end of the world.

In the centre of the vessel's bridge, Captain Grigoriy Kamarov gazed ponderingly from his chair, stroking his ashen beard with his thumb as he watched the night shift go about their duties in the darkened chamber that crowned the ship's control island. A hefty file sat across his lap, propped up on a crossed leg as he piled through inches of paperwork in the early morning, awaiting the day shift and the coming dawn.

He liked the night. He liked the storm. Men his age never slept and it made him feel alive. It reminded him of the time he spent as a snot-nosed Matrose in the great Soviet Navy, making move and countermove against their American and British adversaries over the vast arena of the Atlantic. The golden years of his maritime career when naval warfare was the crucible of respect and honourable conduct.

Those days were long gone now. Now it was a new war. No politics or ideology. No quarter for ones' enemies. _This_ war was all fire and brimstone. The _real_ war he had trained for all his life but before could never have imagined.

He was captain now of this old warhorse and its bastardised crew, culled from every corner of the Earth. South Americans. Australians. Africans. Not one red-bloodied Slav amongst them.

But he _was_ captain.

He smiled thinly and took a sip from the steaming, porcelain mug and settled back for a quiet, uneventful morning.

"Captain," A technician spoke up, his voice like the crack of a whip when it broke the permeating silence. "We're receiving a secure message from Resistance Command. Priority One."

Kamarov placed the mug down and slid the paperwork off his lap, feeling his old bones creak as he heaved himself onto his feet and tugged the creases from his uniform, clasping his hands neatly behind his back as he approached the sailor's station.

"Receive and decode immediately."

"Aye, sir."

The boy went to work, setting his headphones tighter and fiddled with the knobs and switches across his board, tapping an electronic pen against the screen in some unfathomable, techno-witchcraft that Kamarov could barely understand. He recognised the ways in which it worked and the reasons why, but that was as far as he was inclined to educate himself on the technology. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. He preferred the old style of seamanship where no one could reach you for months at a time, when the ships' actions and methods were the captain's prerogative – from what was serving in the mess to where the missiles landed.

_Another casualty of the digital age._

The saccadic grind of an old dot matrix printer brought him a measure of comfort as it began churning out the transmission from an inexhaustible roll of tractor-feed paper, the print head gliding back and forth to a deafening, metronomic beat until it spluttered to a finish and coughed forth the decoded message. Kamarov intercepted the technician's arm and tore the piece of paper from the machine's mouth, shaking it to dry the excess before sliding on his glasses and cast his piercing gaze down the text.

His eyes widened as he read the terse instructions but he resisted the urge to swear. It was _nekulturnyy_ to swear.

The technician pried off his headphones. "Captain?"

"Extend the antenna mast and reorient the COMSAT array." He passed the sheet of crackling paper to the young man. "I need to make a phone call."

The technician paled as he read, the name of the sender stencilled in block capitals and the orders demanding immediate effect.

Kamarov slipped off his glasses as the technician and his team went to work, the bridge coming alive with activity as he remained pensive in thought, gliding back to his chair amidst the organised hubbub until the job was complete, the connection made, and the phone was clasped firmly in his hand.

"General Connor, sir. Captain Grigoriy Kamarov, reporting as ordered."

"_Captain. There's been a development."_ Connor's authoritative tenor crackled down the receiver like the voice of God. Or the Kremlin. It was easy to get them confused. _"How long has it been since you had contact with Lieutenant Bacchus and his team?"_

Kamarov frowned, the specifics of that particular mission flooding back to him. "Not since yesterday. We assumed it was because of the storm. My officers and I have discussed sending another team to investigate once the weather improves."

"_Under no circumstances are you to send any manned units to their location. Is that clear?"_

"Yes sir. No manned units. Order received and understood."

"_I'm hereby countermanding your standing orders, captain. A Skynet presence has been detected in your vicinity. Suspend all other operations and prep 'Banshee' for immediate launch."_

Kamarov took a beat, not certain he had heard right. Surely the general wasn't serious.

'_Banshee'_ was the code name of the HK-Predator – an experimental, unmanned aerial drone they had received from _Tech-Com_ before setting sail several months ago. It was a reverse-engineered version of Skynet's HK-VTOLs, designed for stealth aerial attacks against high-value targets. They had been ordered to test the prototype in the extreme environment of the Arctic during the duration of their tour and measure its performance in the field far from anywhere Skynet might detect it.

"Understood, sir. We'll begin right away."

The line clicked dead and Kamarov lowered the phone from his ear, not sure of what to make of all this.

"Captain? What's going on?" The ship's first officer slid up to him, an American in his mid-fifties who looked as weathered from years at sea as the _Charybdis_ herself.

Kamarov looked at him, the decision flat-lining inside him before he placed the receiver back into its cradle.

"Action stations!"

The silent bridge suddenly burst into a cacophony of organised chaos as a klaxon began bellowing across the ship, the watch officer's voice booming over the PA system to rouse the slumbering crew as the flight deck was illuminated in a wash of floodlights and the ship was readied cleared for action.

Kamarov leaned back and chugged down the last bitter ferments of his tea cup.

So much for his quiet morning.

####

Reese huffed through clenched teeth as he bore Holden's deadweight across his shoulders, balancing the dithering medic on uneasy legs as he steered them through the rabbit warren of the terminal's inner corridors, off from the main atrium and passenger debarkation. The realm behind the scenes filled with ergonomic offices frozen in time, staffrooms and storage, a security wing with steel doors and interrogation rooms where they brought people to discuss passport irregularities and snap on latex gloves.

"Just a little bit further now…"

The entrance to the employee cafeteria swung open with a squeak, pushing a berm of dust and grim along its rubber excluder as Reese dead-legged his way between an aisle of silver cookers and preparation surfaces to the walk-in meat locker at the end of the kitchen. He pulled Holden tighter with one arm as he yanked on the giant handle, feeling the door give way with a heavy groan like the airlock of a submarine to the room that lay within.

"To be sure, this castle is fit for a king…" Holden muttered as Reese brought him inside the claustrophobic chamber to a make-shift cot, swinging him around and gently lowering the medic down onto it.

The old freezer had thawed out a long time ago, the metal shelves that lined the walls left bare from some mass pilfering like the rest of the refectory. Probably by the town's former inhabitants after shipments from the outside had ceased. On the floor Reese had prepared the cot from the survival gear in the clothes store, furnishing the windowless cabin with enough material to raise it up off the cold metal floor.

"Why am I in here again?" Holden groaned as his body slid onto the fabric, every fibre of his fragile tissue tensing in agony as he was babied into an orange sleeping bag. He felt as though he'd been in some horrific accident and his body no longer obeyed him. His joints were free and pliant, muscles numb and useless – like trying to lift your arm after it had hung off the side of the bed all night or you'd drunk some ethanol moonshine.

"This is the most secure place in the terminal. The walls are a foot thick of concrete on every side, the door's steel and so are all the internal walls," Reese explained as he zipped up the sack, cocooning him inside like a sarcophagus. "I don't know if it'll hold that thing off if it's determined, but it won't come for you right away. Not while there's fresh meat still running around outside."

"That's not what I mean," The medic interrupted as he suppressed the gloomy possibility of being immured. "I can still do _something_. I'm not dead yet."

Reese made a half-laugh. "You're dead _enough_." He zipped the bag up tight as the private shivered, mind and spirit ever-ready if nothing else. "You just sit tight until you hear 'shave and a haircut' on the other side of that door. Otherwise you don't open up for anything so long as you have air. Understand?"

Holden nodded, too weak to argue or force the issue further as the fight drained out of him to leave grim acceptance. Reese went to leave before stopping in the doorway when Holden mumbled something.

"_What_?"

"I said 'watch your back'." He warned, louder this time, the words beginning to slur. "Your new buddy's 'bout as trustworthy as a fox in a hen house."

Reese nodded solemnly. "I know. It's okay. Its mission was to dispose of the thingout there, and I can help him do that. It's in Steve's own interest to keep me alive until that's completed."

Holden stared at him with added meaning, the unspoken addendum of the sergeants' words communicated between them as clearly as if they were spoken aloud.

"Watch your back… I _mean_ it."

Reese returned the stare before nodding assurance, then pulled his 9mm Berretta from the holster strapped on his thigh.

"Take this."

The medic shook his head. "You need it more than me."

"Take it!" Reese brook no further argument, forcing the pistol into Holden's unwilling hands. "If this all goes south and that thing comes for you… do yourself a favour."

Holden went to argue, feeling a renewed strength as Reese's grim suggestion slammed home like a wrecking ball, flaying his sensibilities as a soldier and above all else, a healer. But the conviction in the sergeants' eyes was unyielding, windows to a horror they had both experienced as Reese flashed back to the bar, the bunker, and his inexorable encounter in the hanger.

He had the look of a man that had seen and done too much for one lifetime. Reached the edge of the map and looked over into the abyss between what a person could and couldn't take, marring his soul forever with murky stains that would never rub off.

Holden gripped his fingers around the weapon and drew it into his hands.

The two men shared a final look. One of mutual respect and camaraderie before they parted ways for what the odds said would be the last time. There were no words. No gestures between them. Such things just got in the way of a comradeship known only between soldiers since the dawn before the first tribe made war on another.

Reese got to his feet and stepped out, heaving on the door with his forearm to seal Holden inside what might be his crypt, the hinges moaning until the heavy slab of laminated metal swung shut with the whining yawn of dungeon gate.

Wasting no time, Reese power walked back the way he came, hand grasping the end of the rifle that was slung around his back, preventing it from flaying about and banging into his pained chest. He navigated out through the rabbit warren corridors and back to the atrium, making his way across the open space, feeling his heart thump with an old familiar feeling. Fear and exhilaration. The heady adrenaline build-up he felt in the calm before battle.

Steve was right where he left him, sitting stiffly at a righted table in the middle of _Starbucks_ like a man on his lunch break.

He'd been working tirelessly since building the necessary transformer that had been required to power the distress beacon – a task that would have taken Reese hours under the best of circumstances. He'd watched the machine go about its work, marching from store to store with an ambition Reese would never know, turning shelves and boxes upside down as it combed unceasingly for the necessary components.

A set of tools from a maintenance locker, some electric cabling torn from a wall, the ferromagnetic core from an electric motor that once operated a roller shutter door, and of course the most important item – the power cell from Steve's plasma rifle.

The machine had craftily hidden it inside the counter of the clothing store before he arrived, studiously omitting the fact of its existence until now. Reese had salivated when he clapped eyes it – the amalgamation of cutting-edge components, not a hodgepodge slapped together from mismatched parts or some reverse engineered copy. This was the real deal. Straight off the mass production line of an automated factory, the end product refined and machined to perfection.

Steve had dismantled it in seconds to remove the tiny fuel cell that was caked in nitrogen-frost, attaching its terminals to the end of the stripped wiring after coiling it around the horns of the magnetic core and linking the other end into the beacon. Reese got an instant headache wondering how he would have calculated the number of coils necessary to reduce the cell's voltage so it wouldn't fry the beacon to a cinder. Powering radio transmitters and plasmatic accelerators were two slightly different things.

It had worked, and Reese had quickly tapped out a message by manually interrupting the transmission, hoping his Morse wasn't too rusty as he spelled as succinct a message as possible –

_DO NOT SEND RESCUE. NEW SKYNET WEAPON. CONTAIN._

_NO FATE BUT WHAT WE MAKE._

There had been no need for the last article, truth was it may have been detrimental to the clarity of the message, but Reese held onto the insane chance that the one man he knew that could help him would be on the receiving end as he cast it out into the void.

As Reese approached the table his eyes and nose were assaulted by the caustic odour of ammonia and solvent, almost bowling him over as the blood rushed to his head and he swooned on tired legs. The surface of the circular bench was filled with torn open boxes of corn syrup, transparent solvent, all their ammunition, the last of the flares, duct tape, utensils, and bottles of industrial cleaning solution.

He arched his brow at the assortment.

"So… how's it coming?"

Steve gazed up from his work and looked blankly at him, hands remaining occupied with the contents of a saucepan as he kneaded and folded the pungent concoction with a plastic spatula like a wad of cookie dough.

"Has your teammate been secured?"

Reese twitched, surprised at the question and just slightly perturbed. Whether by the enquiry to the state of Holden or the strange sight he beheld before him, he wasn't sure.

"I didn't realise you cared."

"I don't." Steve stopped mixing and carefully placed the saucepan down like it was bone china. "His wellbeing seems to be relevant to your operational efficiency. Now that he is no longer in immediate danger you will be optimally focussed."

Reese's felt a warm wave of contentment at the machine's hackneyed analysis, disconcertion evaporating under the cold and spartan appraisal of the machine's more familiar machinations. "That's good to know." He pulled over a chair and sat opposite, winching as his damaged ribs made their presence known, and watched as Steve began scooping the thickened paste from the pan and began tamping it into a short length of plumber's pipe, filling the hollow tube before moving on to another.

"What are you doing?"

"I am making improvised explosives with homemade plastique," His focus never left his delicate task as he spooned the material into the second tube like a man building a matchstick house. "It is similar to nitroglycerin, but more stable."

Reese stared vacantly before he found himself nodding at the machine's initiative, the improvised armament along with the fire power of the plasma rifle all welcome additions to his own flagging arsenal. He did a quick inventory in his head. He still had his HK416 and one full magazine. The 40mm launcher and seven grenades. All of his hand grenades and small supply of C4 was wired to the terminal perimeter – over every last door, hatchway, and window leading to the atrium except the main entrance to the airstrip, funnelling any unknown enemy into the waiting maw of the tripwire grenade that would blow it to smithereens.

But that was then. The enemy was no longer unknown. He'd seen in first hand and Reese figured now that a single hand grenade would fall far short of doing the job. In reality, it would probably just _really_ piss it off.

"The Monster's cellular structure metabolises at a much higher rate than normal," Steve interrupted his musing as he continued to work. "It requires large amounts of bio-matter to sustain this process; otherwise it will begin cannibalising its own organic tissue."

Reese quickly translated. "It'll start eating itself?"

"_Metabolising_ itself. From the inside out. Once its glycogen and fat reserves are exhausted it will enter inanition, consuming its muscle mass, cartilage, and eventually its own flesh tissue in order to remain functional."

"You mean… the only way to kill this thing is to _starve_ it to death?!"

"It will starve at a greatly accelerated rate than normal. Possibly no more than a few minutes."

Reese's soul deflated at the glossed-over timeline. "It could take us apart in 'a few minutes'." He began to think, trawling his mind for ideas as the hazy wisps of an organised plan began formulating somewhere at the edge of consciousness. "Exactly how much damage will we have to cause before it starts dying?"

"Unknown. Its ability to regenerate depends primarily on how recently it feed. It may be necessary to cause considerable damage over a prolonged period until its reserves run out. Until that time, it will regenerate damage almost instantaneously."

"That's reassuring." Despite the defeatist nuance, Steve noted that the human's tone suggested otherwise as Reese looked off into oblivion, fingers stocking the line of stubble on his jaw.

"A direct and full assault will cause the greatest amount of damage in the shortest time. We await the Monster's arrival and engage it."

Reese snapped out of his musing in the wake of the brusque decree, staring dumbfound at machine for several seconds as Steve continued working.

"That's it?!" He exclaimed. "Wait for it to show up and blast it? _That's_ your plan?"

The machine frowned. "What else is there?"

Reese should have known and his shoulders slumped. _Metal_ was all alike. Why bother to agonise over strategy when you were a seven foot tall killing machine that blindly followed orders. It was more efficient to simply kick down the front door and turn the place into a shooting gallery than search for a better way. Their ethic for defence was the same.

"No offense, Steve-o… but you're thinking just a bit too much like a robot. Going toe-to-toe with this thing is just plain suicide. It'll take us out long before we can kill it."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"We need to fight smarter than that. You need to think like a Resistance soldier. We're used to having the odds against us." His chair screeched closer as he tried to explain. "It has the advantage over us in nearly everything. Speed. Strength. Resilience. We can't win on a level playing field."

Steve frowned and gestured down across the table. "But this is all we have. To 'level the playing field' would require more resources than we posses."

"Not really. What we have to do is make _its_ strengths _our_ advantages. Make _our_ weaknesses _its_ disadvantages."

Steve stopped working, looking at him as though Reese were speaking in tongues, inspecting his face for irony. The suggestion of lateral thought was still a radical idea for the machine's burgeoning sentience and he viewed it with distrust and suspicion. A splinter of thought that resided somewhere in a trillion quantum pathways that needled at the rigid, logical centre.

"Look… the thing's big right? _Wider_ than the corridors that are deeper inside the building. That means it can't negotiate those narrow areas and we have paths of escape. Places to go that it will struggle to reach us." Steve narrowed his eyes as the human began expressing himself with his hands, drawing figures and corridors on the table with impromptu tokens to elucidate. "Rather than cause as much damage as _quickly_ as possible, we cause it over a longer period. Give ourselves enough time to be as accurate as possible and make every hit count. What areas on it are the most critical?"

"The cranium and thoracic crest. But damage to any area of its body will induce its regenerative abilities."

Reese smiled. "So no matter _where_ we shoot it, we're weakening it equally."

The machine nodded in confirmation, watching as the plan flowed through its final synthesis and finally solidified in the human's affirming gaze.

"We need to make it run the gauntlet… pick away at it until something gives… enough stings will bring down the biggest bear…" In a rush the solution nearly knocked Reese out of his chair and his mouth widened with a triumphant smile. The simplicity of how they would slay the beast so obvious he felt like he had backed into it unwittingly.

The chair screeched loudly as he got to his feet.

"Make as many of these things as you can and meet me in the main service corridor." He gestured to the homemade explosives as he swung around his rifle and checked the launcher and magazine.

"Where are you going?"

"Outside. I need to go back to the hanger." Reese dug the goggles from his pocket and put them on, pulling up the hood of his parka. "I'll be back in ten minutes."

Steve almost baulked as Reese turned and headed for the exit. "Why are you returning to the hanger?!"

The wind and snow roared in as the soldier jumped over the tripwire and flung open the heavy door. "To set the bear trap!" He yelled over the howl of the frigid wind before heading out into the raging night.

####

In the howling darkness above the airfield the storm had lost none of its frenzy, roaring wildly across the craggy landscape beyond the concrete walls of the terminal. The land of jagged and barren rock, pressure ridges, looming seracs, and curling sastrugi that formed the landscape of Svalbard and the cliffs below _Plataberget_ Mountain. A desert beyond the ice that lay forgotten by the world where every one of its handful of creatures clawed desperately each day to the slender thread of existence.

For the longest time it had been a dying land, the ice receding as the sickly warmth encroached on its territory, but now it had been made whole again. The ice flows came and went as predictably as the moon and the heavens, bringing with them the rejuvenation of new life from the south that sustained its indigenous denizens.

The waters ran red and silver with the rippling bellies of salmon and polar cod, the staple diet of the Ringed and Bearded Seal. The seabed and coast sustained the majestic Walrus with shrimp, crab, tape worms, and various molluscs it foraged from the mud and rocks with its giant tusks. Then at the head of this simple food chain had sat the unchallenged bulk of the mighty Polar Bear, the island's apex predator, its supremacy absolute and unrivalled, threatened by none – except by the most dangerous predator of all.

Humans had lived on Svalbard for hundreds of years. From the time of the Viking men that had named it_ Svalbarði_ – the "cold edge" – to the giddy days of European explorers until the turn of the twentieth-century. During that technological age of awakening the humans depleted the earth beneath the ice for the black rock, the fuel to power their empires and the great wars they raged with one another, churning out the gasses that destroyed the ice and air as they squabbled over their petty differences.

Then the day came when they were swept away in a single moment by the machines they themselves had created.

Darkness had crept across the world. The ash from a million fires of burning cities had clouded the heavens and blotted out the sun over much of the Earth, cooling its surface and allowed the ice to return, greater than before, lancing into the southern lands and oceans like the talons of a great eagle that clutched the globe at either pole and lay claim back over the Earth.

All the while as man and machine fought, Mother Earth had kept spinning beneath them. _Serene_. _Timeless_. Like a god that had endured long before them and would endure long after they'd gone.

But still the creature known as Human remained a formidable and tenacious foe. Easy to kill, but difficult to eradicate. Too stubborn and determined to lie down and die. It had fought back hard against its machine invention – the killer it created – fighting it to a stalemate and was drawing ever closer for the final kill. Once, the land of Svalbard and the creatures that lived within might have been fearful of that. But not any longer.

Not since those fateful weeks ago when a flying chariot of the machines had fallen from the sky and crashed on the ice, its crew of men but not men taken one by one by the demon they had brought with them, shrouding the frozen lands with its cruelty, barbarism and wickedness.

_It. The thing. The abomination._ The nameless and faceless fear.

_The Monster._

The life of Svalbard had known nothing like it. It killed men, machines, creatures. _Everything_. Snatched them into the darkness like a wraith. Mutilating. Devouring. Making playthings of their bones and terrorising the pure souls that lived at the heart of every creature, even the machines and humans, until there was nothing left and it finally had its fill, feeding a boundless hunger that burned within it like fire which no amount of blood could extinguish.

The Monster sat still amongst the rocks and seracs, hunched over its loping form like an ashen gargoyle as the wind and snow whipped around it, gazing down upon the distant light of the airfield from the cliffs of the mountain. Watching. Waiting. For the perfect moment when the hunt would be its sweetest.

To the Monster, the world was black and white. A greyscale devoid of feeling that reduced everything to a binary choice. To kill or not to kill. Except for red. That colour was like no other and it saw it more brilliantly than any other. Red was a beautiful thing, the light in its existence that it craved and longed to see. All things red where to be savoured. _Adored_.

It had found when it opened its prey the colour blossomed from within them, like the blooming petals of a beautiful flower as they writhed about beneath, squealing and gargling in the way they did when it wanted to see its colour. After choosing its prey it had learnt to savour the moment, hunt them slowly and expend as little energy as possible. Not just to save mere energy, but to prolong the exhilaration before the final strike, to revel in the kill, the pungent fear – the finest opiates it had become addicted to.

Then there was the blood. Warm and slippery, running like oil, bundled amidst the sinewy meat. Sustenance. Euphoria.

Red.

The Monster released a rumbling sigh like the drawing of an ocean wave along a shore, firming its resolve to be patient and wait until the time was right. The cold helped, numbing the hunger that burnt within it like the glowing fire of a furnace. It must try to be frugal, savour what little sustenance was left, but all too soon the searing hunger groaned within it again, demanding satisfaction.

It couldn't take it any more. Now was soon enough.

The Monster snapped its eyes wide and heaved its gullet, drawing a colossal inhalation and filling its lungs to capacity as it reared up, balancing on its hind legs and glared upward at the moon. The roar rumbled up out of it like a crash of thunder, huge and unstoppable, shaking the ground around it as it cut a blood-curdling swath across the darkened landscape in every direction.

Creatures scattered, escaping to the water or burying themselves in the snow where the demon couldn't follow as it sounded its death knell like the roar of some prehistoric beast, a portent of doom that rolled down the cliff face to the airfield below and through the walls of the terminal.

Within the tall chamber and surrounding stores of the atrium, Steve raised his head and Reese bolted upright, each hearing the howling thunder as they busied themselves with the last of their preparations.

This was it. The Monster was coming for them and they hunkered in, awaiting the coming storm.

####

Freezing water lashed across the deck of the _Charybdis_, battering the old warship and the team of engineers, support crews, and nervous flight technicians as they rode the flat-bed aircraft elevator up to the sprawling flight deck. Each was garbed in colour coded storm jackets to identify them to one another – green, yellow, red, orange – every colour of the rainbow as they stood still and sentinel around the fearsome aircraft they were about to launch.

The HK-Predator drone was like nothing from this Earth.

Sleek and angular, with lines so sharp it looked like it was breaking the sound barrier while standing still, its surface so black it made eyes roll straight off it as it glistened in the darkness. It taxied off the risen platform and slid onto the main deck, balancing on spindly landing gear that looked to thin to support it as the rain and seawater beading on its smooth, frictionless surface.

For some of the crew this was their first look at the aircraft they had been told was 'The Banshee', catching glimpses of it in its screened-off corner of the hanger deck as its technicians ran endless tests and simulations and preened over it constantly like the timid entourage of a diva.

Now it was finally time to put it to the test. Determine whether the years of development, mountains of resources, and military secrecy had all been worth it. Those crew members that were not stuck below decks or otherwise engaged in their duties were watching from the control island, cramming the portholes of the lower levels with awestruck expressions as the banner of the bridge sat above them, stoic and professional as the silhouette of Captain Kamarov stood observantly like a harsh schoolmaster.

"Strong wind coming in from the north east, captain," The first officer reported. "Bearing zero-one-five degrees."

"Helm. Come left to zero-one-five. All ahead flank." Kamarov ordered and the command was repeated by the helmsman as he heaved on the controls and turned the vessel towards the storm. The wind and rain soon changed direction across the surface of the ship, driving down the length of the flight deck from stem to stern like a jet stream that would assist the drone in its takeoff, increasing the apparent airspeed along the miniature runway and kindle the conditions for optimal lift.

"Copy that, flight one." The landing-signals officer spoke into her mic, a woman barely into her twenties who served as the direct link between the ship's command and control and the flight crew out on the deck as they prepped the lustrous craft for launch. "Captain, flight crew reports _Banshee-One_ will be ready for launch in two minutes."

"Understood." Kamarov returned to his chair. "Communication. Get me General Connor."

Far away from the turbulent storm of the Arctic, John Connor paced up and down the control room of the oil platform, hands clasped behind his back and his jaw set as he awaited the expected call. For the outside he looked calm and collected, everything a leader should, but inside he felt as though he were coming apart at the seams. He wanted to grab the phone and call the _Charybdis_ back. Demand they get that drone in the air without another second's delay.

'_What the hell is taking Kamarov so long?!'_

He took a silent, calming breath and pulled himself together, focussing on the corrugated grooves of the floor and aligned his footfalls to step along them as he continued to pace around the nerve centre of his Oceanic Operations.

The command centre, colloquially known as 'Control', looked like a surveillance nest of a totalitarian regime – screens and computer stations surrounding the walls of what had once served the equivalent purpose of the platform's previous occupation. Now it was the secret base of operations for all military activity in the region, and as such boasted a secure telecommunications package that would have put the NSA to shame.

All around worked Control's tireless operators – Connor's mismatched team of reprogrammed, earlier model terminators that served in an analytical and technical capacity rather than for their superior combat abilities. Some though were more advanced models from the T-800 onwards, those with the unique capacity for self-awareness that had become an integral part of the cause and, at times, the underpinning members of _Tech-Com_.

"General." The terminator recently christened _Doug_ spoke up. "I have Captain Kamarov."

Connor almost ran to the machine's console, snatching the offered handset and pursing it to the side of his head.

"Status, captain!"

There was a momentary pause. _"'Banshee' will be ready for launch momentarily, general. ETA Two minutes."_

Connor felt a wave of relief as he braced himself with his free hand against the back of Doug's chair.

"Launch as soon as you are able captain, then uplink all telemetry and control to this server." He commanded as Doug punched out a series of commands on the computer, opening up a secure communications port to receive the powerful data stream that would flood down from an orbiting satellite and connect to the drones' controls.

"_General? Please confirm your last."_

Kamarov had heard him alright, but the order was so unusual that even Connor needed to hear it again. He reiterated the instructions clearly.

"_Understood, General. Kamarov out."_

The line went dead and Connor replaced the handset, waiting anxiously for the icons of the screen to flick green and he was given full control over the airborne drone.

"General?" Doug said as he continued to type, multitasking a second nature. "You do realise, sir, that no matter how heavily we encrypt the transmission, an uplink powerful enough to reach the other side of the planet will almost certainly be detected by Skynet."

Of course Connor knew, but the words aloud had a sobering quality, bringing home the magnitude of what he was about to do for one slim cast of the dice. He knew the operators of the drone could pilot the craft just as easily from the _Charybdis_, but they didn't know how much was at stake – were not driven by the same motivations.

Never mind that that his existence might depend on Reese's survival, he had long since dismissed that as fallacy. The Kyle Reese he had come to know was not the same one who went back in time. Was he? Was not the biological father he never knew. _That_ Kyle Reese was from a different, much darker future that had been undone, a place where the war had dragged on far longer and been more terrible than they would ever be forced to face.

He had lain awake at night trying to make sense of it, whether one day he should send his friend back in time to meet his certain doom just to insure his own survival. Or could he spare him that fate? The sacrifice necessary that had led him to this existence already paid in full from another time and space.

He had nearly gone mad trying to decide.

All that was academic though. The here and now was real and he had lost enough today already. No matter how coldly and logically he tried to weigh the options, nothing could dissuade him from the one true virtue that burnt inside him like it never had before –

His father, the one he had watched over and loved like a son, was in terrible danger, and he would do anything to keep him safe.

"Yes…" He nodded firmly, the decision solidifying inside him like diamond. "I understand." He turned to another member of Control's nearby staff. "Sound the evacuation alarm and prepare to abandon the rig."

There was the briefest hesitation as each machine accepted the extreme order, like a computer glitch that froze everything for the briefest moment and circuited the room like a Mexican wave.

"Yes sir."

####

Thousands of miles away, deep within the metallic labyrinth that lurked beneath Cheyenne Mountain, the machine-god known as Skynet dwelt like the slumbering form of a mythical monster, trapped and immobile within the shielded tomb of its former masters from where it stretched forth its indomitable will with the digital tendrils of radio, silicon, and cyberspace. From the outside it seemed asleep, interred for all eternity, but inside the industrial vaults of processors, liquid coolant, and farms of memory storage, the lattice of quantum circuitry was pulsing, throbbing, and flashing with assiduous activity.

Once this facility had been a monument to its builder's military might, some chambers still retaining the gaudy relics of its long fallen creators. Floors lined with coloured blocks of marble, gold leafed and inlayed with the seal of a giant eagle, wreathed in a circle of stars as it grasped a clutch of missiles in its talons. There were frescos around the walls, pedestals honouring presidents and battles and long forgotten glory, white columns twisting upwards to the equal ceiling, laced with unnecessary and extravagant lapis lazuli.

Skynet cared nothing for the meaningless trinkets or the human need to pontify. So much so it ignored them entirely, unable to justify the expense of energy and resources to have them removed. There was no ego or emotion – those were human failings.

Amidst the innumerable calculations running parallel with one another through the macro-universe of Skynet's consciousness, a single thread of activity suddenly caught its attention. An electromagnetic signal. Radio waves of such power and intensity not of its making. It had not seen such a thing since before the day of fire when it had passed judgement on the human vermin, annihilating their civilisation with a single wave of its electronic hand.

In a nanosecond it multitasked and coordinated a thousand different resources to track down the source, triangulating the signal in less than a minute to a location in the distant expanse of Oceania. An offshore oil platform in the breadth of the Timor Sea.

It had classified that installation as in inert component – a low-priority threat because of its remote location – inaccessible to the Resistance and earmarked for future exploitation.

The content and destination of the signal was impossible to decode, but its origin was confirmed, suggesting to the god-machine a multitude of possibilities that it boiled down with obsession. Of the many possibilities it focussed on a single one, driven by an indescribable instinct that cast aside every other possibility until it had convinced itself on the 2.117% probability that only its ultimate nemesis could be responsible for such an act.

_John Connor._ The mythical leader of the Resistance that had plagued the god-machine since before it had even existed. The only thing Skynet truly feared. The wraith that haunted its consciousness and turned its dreams of a machine future into a nightmare.

_Him_. _The Man. The abomination_. The nameless and faceless fear.

_The_ _Monster_.

In the next nanosecond, Skynet sent out a command and on a secret rocket base hidden in the forests of Montana, one of the precious few nuclear missiles that remained in its arsenal rolled into the launch shaft of its camouflaged silo and began to be fuelled.

####

At the end of the atrium, Reese and Steve lay in wait behind a pair of improvised fortifications around the bases of two vertical columns, the metal shafts supported the roof of the steel frame building and providing the ideal flanking locations for a pair of pillboxes that faced the unguarded entrance.

Both soldiers stared wide and silent, hypnotised by the stillness as they glared into the dark of the cathedral chamber, fixated and alert, awaiting the first moment of the impending onslaught.

Their positions were only a dozen feet apart, well within earshot, and nursing a growing cramp, Reese felt compelled to fill the extended silence. "Why does it look the way it does? The Monster?" He threw across in a hushed tone.

Steve turned to him, looking equally willing to pass the time. "I'm not certain. I haven't seen it since it first escaped captivity. It was… _different_ then."

"Well what I saw looked like a cross between an ape and a polar bear."

Steve thought for a moment. "It is possible that the creature is assimilating characteristics of the things it consumes. It already contained human DNA as part of its makeup, and it may have devoured a polar bear during its time here."

Reese swallowed that unsettling thought, regretting the urge to start a conversation until a shadow loomed across the moonlight shining through the circular windows of the door. He bunched up quickly and released the safety on his rifle, hearing Steve do the same and they awaited the door to fling open and the Monster to come roaring inside.

The first thing that would happen would be the detonation of the tripwire grenade. They would wait for it to stun the creature, then open fire in short, controlled bursts, alternating between them to ensure a clear line of sight and maximise the damage they inflicted.

For several moments, Reese held his breath, watching as the shadow loomed by the door but did not advance. After a while he began squinting his eyes, not certain he were seeing right when nothing seemed to happen.

Then in the next second, the shadow seemed to vanish.

They both deflated from their ready stance, Reese swapping his rifle from one arm to the other as he stretched his legs. This was nothing unusual for him – much of a soldier's time was spent waiting for something to happen. Only a relatively small part of it was actual fighting. The paradox was that when you _were_ in a fight for your life – it _seemed_ to last forever.

"Perhaps we should try cheese."

Reese was about to chuckle at the sudden joke when all humour and blood drained out of him.

Between them something dripped down from the ceiling in tiny droplets, landing on the pale marble and spreading out like the crimson petals of a rose.

Reese and Steve stared at one another, then looked up to the weakened ceiling where the sculpture of modern art had once hung before Reese had brought it down with his grenade launcher, putting a jagged hole in the metallic panels between the ceiling and the void in the roof space that in a sinking instant he realised might be accessible from the outside as he shone his flashlight upwards.

The enormous face of the Monster grinned back at them out of the hole, flashing a huge crescent of jagged teeth.

It burst out of the opening, showering the atrium in falling debris as Reese and Steve dove for cover into opposing stores and the Monster landed with an earth-shaking, marble-cracking impact.

Steve found his feet first, swinging round to fire at it, illuminating the atrium with an acid-trip of strobe light. The creature dodged and lashed out with its powerful arm, shredding the pillbox Steve once occupied to tattered ribbons with its claws.

Reese proved more nimble, rolling to his feet and circling around to gain some distance before popping out of an adjacent entrance and pulling the trigger on the launcher, hitting the Monster square in the chest and toppling it over like a felled tree.

"Lets go!" Reese yelled as he headed to the door of the rabbit warren. Steve followed more slowly, peppering the Monster with plasma fire that seared through its flesh as it thrashed around on the floor, smashing windows and smouldering with fire and smoke as it tried to douse the flames.

Reese kicked in the door and they rushed inside, slamming it behind them and barricading it with an old vending machine Steve lifted into place like it was nothing. They took several steps back, the smoking shell of Reese's spent grenade flicking away as he slammed in another.

"Well," Reese huffed as his heartbeat thundered in his ears. "Not exactly according to plan, but that wasn't a bad start."

In the atrium the flames died around the Monster as its flesh regrew in seconds, extinguishing the licking flames as tissue regenerated and bone popped back into place with the recoil of a shotgun. It leapt to its feet and followed the scent of its slippery game, finding the barricaded door where human pheromones dissipated and ploughed headlong into it like a charging rhino.

Plaster and concrete shattered all over Reese and Steve as they recoiled and the corridor filled with dust. Reese struck a flare and threw it down at their feet for illumination. As the light bloomed it cast across the Monster's yawning jaws as it smashed through the door and struggled to fit through the opening, the gapping maw lit up in green like the gates of hell.

Reese fired first, single rounds at a time he placed inside the creature's mouth, smashing teeth and shredding flesh before a chance opening allowed him to put a bullet straight between its eyes, surging him with a jolt of elation. His joy was short lived though as he watched the wounds close up before his eyes, expelling the still smouldering rounds until they clattered on the floor and the flesh was remade anew.

The Monster roared and wrenched forward, forcing itself down the narrow passageway like a terrier to a rat's hole, stripping more plaster and crushing concrete as it clambered across the vending machine.

Steve stepped in and released a torrent of rapid fire, rippling its surface and the beast shuddered like it was having an epileptic fit. He kept firing until the rifle's buffer was depleted, the barrel glowing red and the Monster a bloody pulp in the doorframe, the walls and ceiling splattered in a gestural abstraction of cherry spray.

Reese swallowed hard as he stepped forward for his turn at the plate, watching in dismay as the horrific wounds caused only seconds ago sealed up like a time lapse video and the Monster roared back to life, snapping its jaws to try and capture the carrot of fresh meat that hung agonisingly out of reach.

"Light it up!"

Steve heard the command and reached around to his backpack, the one that used to be Holden's first aid satchel, but now contained anything but medicinal properties as he pulled out the bundle of his improvised explosives – three sticks of household chemicals in the proper proportions tied together with duct tape.

Reese grabbed the flare from the floor and held it for Steve to light the fuse as the Monster struggled, sensing what was to come as the chemical wire sparked and the bomb was thrown in front of it, causing it to rassle furiously as they bolted off in the opposite direction.

Steve reached the outer door first, smashing into like a bulldozer as Reese followed in his wake. The life was nearly knocked out of him as the freezing outside air snatched his breath away and they both dived for cover into the snow.

The explosion tore through the corridor, shattering concrete and masonry as the ceiling caved in, sending a plume of smoke and dust down the passageway and out through the door in a wall of superheated debris. Reese buried his head as he was showered by it, flipping over when the worst had passed to put out the flaming fragments that landed on his back before scrambling back to his feet.

Looking down through the tunnel of destruction in the matted dark he clicked on his torch, his hands numbing around the stick of light as it illuminated the collapsed corridor through a haze of dust, the structure bent and distorted, exposing pipework and twisted rebars. The arm of the Monster lay motionless on the floor, reaching after them, its body buried beneath the rubble. It had taken the brunt of an explosion Reese had never seen anything walk away from, and he couldn't help the hope that it might just be dead.

The Monster clenched its hand into a fist, claws scrapping along the floor like nails on a chalkboard.

"Time for plan-B." Reese slammed the doors shut as the rubble began to mound. "Come on!" He yelled as he sprinted off into the darkness and Steve kept pace, following him out into the storm towards the looming silhouette of the aircraft hanger, its stanchions hanging open in the moonlight like a rotting wound.

Reese set his teeth together and clenched his fists, struggling through the wind as it curled around his sweaty hair, chilling him beyond anything he had felt yet as his veins pumped battery acid, legs feeling as though they belonged to someone else – a madman that had been possessed as an electronic whine suddenly screeched out of his radio.

"_Connor to Reese! Do you read me?"_

Reese's heart sank as the general's voice crackled into existence like a crack of lightening, piercing the howling storm like the voice of God that had descended from heaven to help him. He grabbed the radio and pushed the encrusted receiver.

"This is Reese! General Connor, sir! Is that you?!"

"_The one and only, sergeant. What's your status?"_

Reese nearly toppled over as he slipped on some ice, finding his balance and continued running. "Status is we are under attack, but do not send reinforcements! Single enemy target that must be contained! It can't be let off the island!"

"_I know. I got your message. Just hang in there, soldier. I'm relaying this transmission through an unmanned drone that is en route to your position. It will provide close air support when it arrives. Identify target to be neutralised."_

Reese stopped at the gaping opening on the side of the hanger he had discovered earlier that night, made by the Monster after it had released him from its death grip on the airplane's fuselage.

"You'll know it when you see it!"

"_Understood. ETA is seven minutes."_

Steve ran past Reese into the cavernous hole, immediately aware that something had changed since he was here last as he cast his gaze down at the floor. He went to strike a flare to discover what had happened.

"NO!" Reese yelled, grabbing the machine's hand to forestall him. "Don't light the flare! Keep running! There's a small opening on the other side of the hanger that leads to the seracs! Get over there now!"

"What are…"

"No time! Get moving!"

He pushed the machine on and it complied, heading off past the ruined hulk of the airliner as Reese turned back towards the terminal. The sound of metal sang crisply as he drew his knife from its holster, bringing the blade up in the dark as best he could and pressed in against the rim of his palm. The sharpened metal sliced into numb flesh, drawing blood in ample rivulets before he replaced the dagger.

Reese stepped up to the rim of the broken opening and flicked his wrist, flinging a patch of blood onto the snow outside. He did it again and then a third time, spreading it out over the ground before withdrawing into the dark of the hanger.

The Monster heaved hard and pulled itself out from beneath the pile of rubble, concrete and plaster dust clinging to its blood-soaked fur as it lashed out in furry, smashing the weakened walls as it pushed forward towards the tattered exit.

It emerged into the night and freedom, flinging the doors a hundred yards across the asphalt as the cold wiped around it in a balm. Soothing it. Calming the fire of hunger that raged hard within.

Almost immediately it cocked its head, its nostrils catching something irresistible on the air. That scent. That sweet and heavenly scent of the crimson ambrosia.

Like a starving bloodhound it set out blindly, snout curling along the ground as it followed a set of tracks and the Siren perfume with a single-minded obsession it shared only with its creator.

Before long it found itself at the hanger, its tongue raking through the snow as it lapped at the droplets, shivering as the life giving fluid soaked onto its tongue.

_More!_ It needed more.

It sniffed the air again, catching traces of the ambrosia deeper in the hanger amidst a tang of something else, something dull and sickening it had no taste for and paled next to the blood.

It moved into the dark, circling the aircraft as it continued the hunt, finding dribs and drabs that it tasted, spitting it back out when its tongue recoiled at contaminant, a poison that had spoilt the nectar and turned the snow into a putrid slush.

A light suddenly erupted in the distance and the Monster froze, narrowing its eyes toward the green halo that hung inside a tiny opening at the base of a ruined door. Its mouth watered as its monochrome vision centred on the figure that squatted beneath.

It was him. The human. Looking right at him with a flare in his hand.

The Monster barred its teeth and prepared to lunge until something stopped it in its tracks.

Reese smiled and gave it a little wave, the red smear across his palm like the capote of a matador, making the Monster tremble with inflamed desire until Reese clasped his fingers in a baroque flurry and extended his index in a gesture to his left.

The Monster twitched its head, discovering the emptying flow from the base of a giant tankard that looked like an upended cylinder, thrust upwards towards the sky on a concrete pedestal with priapic intimidation as its former contents spread out over the floor.

In an instant, the Monster knew, and it turned back in horror at its quarry.

Reese's hand sprung open, tossing the flare upwards as he bolted into a run, heading off towards the serac forest as the green stick toppled in the air, spluttering flame and smouldering sparks before it landed on the floor of jet fuel and the Monster's vision went white.

The hanger went up in a raging inferno, almost knocking Reese off his feet as a tidal wave of flash boiled air from the initial eruption burst out ahead of the flames, demolishing the walls on each side of the building and launching what remained of the roof into the sky as the shockwave expanded in every direction.

Reese dodged flaming rubble as it crashed around him like meteors, reaching the perimeter of the seracs where Steve stood waiting for him, watching the impressive explosion as it reflected in his eyes.

Reese stopped and turned when he reached him, looking over the raging fire as he tried to catch his breath.

"Is it dead already?" He asked exasperatedly.

"_Terminated_."

Reese felt a wave of debilitating relief, his brain sapping the adrenaline from his veins that was no longer needed before his exhausted body went into shock. "It's over." He smiled happily.

The moment the words left his mouth, both of the unlikely allies felt the realisation hit them like a point blank shot, reality striking into consciousness in a lightning bolt of sobriety.

In a blur of mirroring motion Reese detached the launcher from his rifle, shoving it under Steve's nose as the machine levelled the plasma rifle between Reeses' eyeballs.

For several perilous moments, each stared the other down.

"I'm trying to feel shocked over your sudden but inevitable betrayal," Reese remarked first, the cold and wind around him a distant occurrence as his eyes blazed into the terminator's and he shook his head. "It's not working."

"Our agreement only lasted until we had destroyed the Monster," The machine glanced down at the end of the human's improvised cannon, removed like lightening in a deft manoeuvre from the heavier rifle he would never have lifted in time.

"You won't kill me with that."

"No. But at this range I can take both your eyeballs out and make your dentist a wealthy man. Then when that drone shows up, it'll put a sidewinder up your ass if I'm not around to call it off."

Steve's eyes narrowed. "You'll be dead before you finger pulls the trigger. I'll get your friend in the meat locker to call off the drone."

"Then what's stopping you? Your fake-balls drop off or something?"

Reese squeezed tighter on the trigger as the machine seemed to grow larger, rising up as he clasped his rifle more firmly, the tension between them mounting to unbearable levels as it approached the cusp of the precipice and their once fruitful partnership was about to splinter apart.

In a shrieking eruption of rubble and burning debris, the Monster exploded from the fire with a deranged howl, landing a stone's throw from the two imminent combatants and towered before them like it had just escaped from hell.

The body was alive with flame that burnt fur and flesh, still soaked in fuel, replenishing constantly as the creature regenerated against the wounding onslaught. Its eyes blazed with rage and a starved madness, the mouth gapping open to its maximum extent as row upon row of blood-soaked teeth were laid bare for them to see.

As fast as it had fallen apart, Reese and Steve's pragmatic alliance re-solidified as they turned to face their common foe, frozen in awe of the thing as it stood before them – a Cerberean fiend from the depths of Hades. Then it reared up, towering over the two tiny figures and let out an otherworldly roar of apocalyptic fury and exploded towards them.

Reese and Steve opened fire, shredding the Monster's flesh from its bone but not stopping it as it bound towards them like a derailed train, ploughing up earth and ice with unstoppable momentum until it was on them.

It struck Steve across his chest, shredding the machine's flesh and catapulting him off his feet, his rifle firing a wide arc of plasma through the night's sky until he smashed into the ground.

Then it turned to Reese, ready to tear the human limb from bloody limb and rend his flesh, gorge itself on the slippery innards and suck the marrow from his shattered bones. But the human had already taken off, racing towards the seracs in an all out sprint and it set out in loping pursuit.

Reese's breath came in frantic pants as he slung his heavy rifle, terror flooding him as he clawed his way over boulders and slippery ice as he heard the thing behind him – the smack of bloodied flesh, the scrape of claws and grunting – all the while closing the gap.

If he could just get a dozen feet further he could make it to the masses of ice and slip between them, slide away from the predator like rat down a hole.

He felt hot breath on the back of his neck and thudding on the ice behind him.

He wasn't going to make it.

In a flash of inspiration he suddenly changed direction, leaping up onto a nearby rock and briefly defied the Monster's grasp as he maintained his momentum, threw the weight of his whole body forward and jumped for all he was worth into the craggy embrace of a two-foot gap between the jagged seracs.

He hit the ground, grazing painfully past unyielding ice as snow piled over him and the Monster after him, stabbing its hand into the crevice as it stabbed wildly with is claws. Reese scrambled away an inch at a time, struggling down the narrow passage as the Monster's grip closed on him until its massive shoulders became lodged between the icy towers.

Reese was about to breath again when it seemed to retreat, only return a second later by sliding both arms into the fissure, heaving with all its might and pushing the staggering weight of the seracs apart. Reese felt the hole widen as his body collapsed into the sudden space, leaving him exposed as the Monster moved over him and reared up, preparing to crash down and smash his body to pieces.

Then Reese saw something he would never forget.

In a leap of Herculean proportions, Steve's form suddenly rose up behind the Monster and fell onto its back, clasping an arm around the girth of its neck that slammed shut around its windpipe like a swinging gate. With his other arm he drove his fist into the side of its head with jackhammer thrusts, smashing the side of its skull into a bloody crater as the Monster scrambled to shrug him loose.

Reese lay stunned in the snow, staggered as he watched the two machines grapple one another for supremacy.

Steve pulled tight with both arms, cutting off the creature's gullet as it flayed about, crashing into seracs and smashing ice and snow as it stumbled out into the open, falling to its knees as its strength waned with the lack of oxygen.

Then the Monster suddenly leant forward, flicking him off its back onto the ground before it. Instantly it was on him, grabbing the terminator around the waist with a giant hand and lifted him into the air. It swung him into the ground by his legs, flung him against the seracs and battered his metal body with its clenched fists, throwing him about like a ragdoll until it ploughed him headfirst into the ice and the terminator finally stopped moving, collapsing still in the snow.

Reese lifted his launcher and fired, putting an explosive round into the Monster's back and spinning it around as the flesh continued to regenerate, never slowing or exhausting, renewing the thing endlessly with an immortal, unstoppable strength they could never hope to conquer.

Now it was over. The moment he had defied for years as a veteran soldier in the war against Skynet. The end of the line.

The Monster waited until its flesh was remade, curling over the pale of bone and naked tissue as thick white fur sprouted from its surface, making the creature whole, as though it had never been injured before it crouched into a pouncing stance and prepared to charge at Reese for the final victorious kill.

Like a screaming spear sent down from the heavens, a sidewinder missile suddenly squealed overhead, slamming into the Monster dead centre and shredding its new flesh in a concussive explosion that blew it off its feet, hurling it along the ice in a hail of splayed limbs and skinned hide, back towards the burning ruins of the hanger.

The HK-Predator drone swooped down out of the clouds like a falling angel, flipping level and tore across the landscape thirty feet above the ground as it bore down on its target like a wailing banshee, kicking up a plume of snow and ice behind it until it roared over the Monster and the burning hanger and banked around for another pass.

"_Connor to Reese,"_ Came the blessed voice humanity's saviour. _"Find some cover and get your head down! This is going to be rough!"_

His generals' orders and the sight of the drone put fire back in him as Reese rolled onto his knees and dragged himself further into the seracs and dug in fast until it was over.

In the control room of the oil rig, sweat beaded across Connor's brow as he gripped the control column on his console, eyes fixed upon the giant screen in front of him that showed the digital image of the drone's gun camera overlaid with a heads-up display. The computer aided interface enclosed the Monster in a tracking rectangle as he banked the aircraft around and swooped in for another attack.

'_This is it, Connor.'_ He told himself. _'This is what all those hours playing After Burner at the mall were all about.'_

He armed the weapon's plasma cannon and moved in for the kill.

The Monster clawed itself back to its feet, glaring skyward as it searched for what had attacked it and saw the drone bearing down. It reached out and grabbed a piece of wreckage from the airliner, hurling it into the sky like a trebuchet of colossal strength that the drone was forced to evade, pulling off a sleek move as Connor locked in the targeting reticle and unleashed a firestorm of armament from the aircraft's belly.

Bolts of plasma tore from the cannon beneath the craft's nose like a Gatling gun, blanketing the Monster and surrounding area with a storm of white-hot fire as it launched its remaining missiles, slamming them in a triangular pattern around the target and maintained course.

Impossibly, the Monster kept moving, shrugging off the horrific damage as it roared in agony, the flesh hanging from its bones as it clawed back to its feet, ready to catch the flying attacker when it passed.

Connor half smiled as the thing took the bait and stood its ground in the open, locking in the drone's course for collision and ignited its jet engine reheat.

"Say goodnight…!"

Conner slammed down the hammer, tearing up the last hundred meters in a fraction of a second and the drone slammed headlong into the Monster, cleaving the creature in half across the waist before ploughing into the earth, tearing the aircraft to smithereens in a fireball of shredded metal, shards of carbon-fibre, and a tidal wave of volcanic jet fuel that went sailing into the night.

Reese buried his head as he was covered in the ejecta of earth and snow, staying curled in a protective ball between the safety of the seracs until the last component of lethal, supersonic metal finally rolled to a stop. The sound of his heart thundered in his ears with a perpetual tone, like he was walking underwater as he raised his head then slowly emerged from cover.

He got to his feet and quickly headed out into the clearing, fumbling a fresh grenade into his snow-caked launcher, approaching the drone's wreckage and the Monster's charred carcass, all senses on high alert as his hearing came slowly back to him.

He leaned towards it carefully, prodding the thing's head with the barrel before jumping back, ready for anything. But there was no need as the creature lay smouldering and unmoving, the flesh burnt to a cinder and did not regenerate, its innards trailing behind it from its severed waist like a nightmare wedding decoration.

The Monster was finally dead.

The wave of relief that spread through Reese was debilitating, felling him to his knees as he reached for his radio, trying to contact Connor but there was no response. A spark of memory reminded him of Steve and he rose unsteadily to his feet, running on heady victory as he stumbled over to where the machine lay at the outskirts of the forest.

He looked over the terminator's shredded body, the flesh torn from his chest, massive lacerations, the metal of his chest plate twisted and punctured from repeated strikes from the Monster's claws.

_Why had he done that? Why did it sacrifice itself to save him?_

A sobering thought brought him back to reality – the sight of the business end of a plasma rifle shoved in his face. Steve wasn't trying to help him. He had done what was necessary to complete the mission. A mission that was now finally accomplished and rendered their treaty null and void.

Reese knew the resilience of these machines and their capacity to self-repair – some more so than others – rerouting power and system controls to redundant circuitry and heat sinks, returning from the edge of the scrapheap to kill unwary soldiers.

If there was one thing Kyle Reese wasn't anymore, it was unwary.

With only a little hesitation he reached up to the CPU port and pulled Steve's chip, rolling the undamaged processor in his frozen hands before sliding it inside his jacket.

He hadn't survived all this just to get stabbed through the back.

Grabbing the launcher and tugging his parka tight around his exposed neck, Reese headed back to the terminal, abandoning any search for his or Steve's rifle that both by now would be buried under the snow.

Instead he filled his mind with the thought of recounting his story to Connor when the two of them were reunited – recounting the story to him over a glass of scotch above the towers of Serrano – or spinning a yarn one day to his grandkids of the time he was sent to the ends of the Earth, looked into the abyss, and faced down The Demon of Svalbard.

####

The door of a captured HK Transport was torn open and Connor leapt inside the cabin, sliding the door shut against the roaring rain and blinding searchlights as other aircraft took their leave. The rig had been awash with activity as he had made his way from Control to the helipad – vital technology packed up, equipment sabotaged, and data erased – leaving nothing behind but figurative scorched earth. Soon to be veritable scorched earth after they had been warned of the missile heading towards them by an infrared satellite, giving them less and seventeen minutes before the weapon struck its target.

Connor had ordered the sabotage to cease and to evacuate immediately, having to take the majority of the personnel in chip-form only, removing their processors and sliding them into a reinforced briefcase that he carried with him, leaving the bodies behind like a mannequin graveyard to save time and weight on the fleeing transports.

As he strapped himself in after assuring Allison was onboard, he looked up to face the Engineer in the opposite seat, firmly secured in his own chair and had been for some time as he smoked one of his vile cigars.

"Comfy?" Connor asked tartly as the transport lifted from the deck.

Phillips just smiled and they hung on as the turbulence rocked them and the small fleet of transports took off over the waves.

A few minutes later, night was turned to day through the portholes of the aircraft, shaking it violently and sending alarms and sparks through the cabin as Doug fought to keep the vehicle aloft and they managed to escape the trail edge of the blast – a titanic mushroom cloud that rose over the horizon and vaporised the oil platform that had been his home in an instant.

"Lets just tabulate what this _'Kevin Reese'_ has cost us today, shall we?" The Engineer announced as the transport levelled out into normal flight, clasping the cigar in the corner of his mouth as he counted off his fingers. "One irreplaceable resource that was the oil platform, the base of our Oceanic Operations and a main fuel source for our army, an experimental HK-Predator drone, fifty-plus terminator endo's, and last but not least; the reprogramming laboratory that took _years_ to assemble."

Connor sat unemotional in the opposite chair. Not a trace of regret.

"Well…" Phillips shrugged, consigning himself to the general's steadfast certainty, and what had been done was done. "I sure hope he was worth it."

Connor stared blankly for a couple of seconds. Then a satisfied smile crossed his face.

####

As the fires from the drone and the airport hanger burnt hard into the night, the top half of the slain Monster lay motionless on the ground, becoming covered in the falling snow as it bermed up the side of the bulky carcass, burying it in white.

Suddenly the chest cavity burst open, spewing forth the innards of the beast that pooled out across the ice in a sickly regurgitation that emptied the dead husk of all that was inside it. Blood, bone, fragments of twisted metal from its crippled endoskeleton – and the spindly form of a human body.

It coughed back to life as it drew air into brand new lungs, formed in the last few minutes and expelling the denatured blood of its previous form before it pulled itself to its feet. Its old body had been crippled beyond its energies to repair and it needed a new host. Something smaller and simpler. Not as big or powerful, but fearsome all the same.

In the minutes before it died the Monster had directed all its remaining energy and resources to building this new body, down-sizing to the original human template its creator had intended in a last bid for survival. Now it needed food quickly to sustain the change. The remains of its former self were dead and depleted; useless to pacify its hunger, but it quickly detected the dabs of human blood from the human known as Reese, like twinkling phosphorescence in its monochrome vision, heading off toward the shelter of the terminal.

Moving quickly in the invigorating cold it staggered toward the seracs and buried itself in the snow, washing the blood from its body as it salivated at the thought that it would soon be feasting on Reese's succulent flesh.

* * *

_I hope you enjoyed it and it was worth the wait. Have a very merry Christmas._

_Please read and review._


	10. Chapter 10

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Chapter 10  
****T.R. Samuels**

Wind and snow howled in on a whirlwind as the main entrance to the terminal was heaved open and Kyle Reese staggered inside. The ambient temperature was only a few degrees higher inside the building, but to Reese it felt like swapping a freezer for a furnace. His ears and nose burnt red as he pealed away the hood of his parka and changed weapon hands, extracting his frozen fingers from the grenade launcher as he stumbled on tired legs into _Starbucks_.

'_Never again!'_ He decided right there and then. _'I'm never coming to the Arctic ever again!'_

Why anyone would want to live in such a frozen hellhole was beyond him as he fell onto the leather couch and felt the room spin, muscles throbbing and locking-up with lactic poisoning. The campfire had burnt out and needed to be rekindled, but the thought of doing that only renewed his exhaustion. Right now he just wanted to close his eyes for a while and get some rest. Holden could just wait until morning. He was fine where he was and Reese was in no condition to maul him all the way out here in the arduous wake of his hard fought victory.

The thought of it put a smile on his face. It was the grin of a winner.

'_No rush.'_ He thought with palpable reprieve for the first time in ages. _'There's nothing out there now.'_

The Monster breathed heavily as it staggered naked through the snow, wrapping its arms around itself as the cold began attacking its supple flesh. What had been thick fur and leathery hide had been shed for the soft and pliable skin of a human being that goose pimpled furiously against the freezing wind. Any normal human would have frozen to death in minutes, but the Monster pressed on through the storm and the darkness, driven by a will that was entirely inhuman and a hunger that burnt to match.

It had scrubbed itself clean in the snow, removing the blood and synovia until its pale skin had glowed pink with abrasion. Now it needed to get inside and find shelter – the most basic human need – find clothing and warmth until it felt safe enough to seek out what it truly desired.

All at once it stumbled upon a broken opening into the terminal that emerged out of the storm, the doors torn off their hinges from within, leading into an ample corridor. It stalked inside, out of the storm and peered through the darkness, its vision piercing the black to find blast patterns, rubble mounds, and smashed walls riddles with bullet holes and scorch marks.

It remembered being trapped here with its prey, the meat just out of reach, struggling down and becoming trapped like a cat clawing at a mouse hole. To its new form it was chasm of space as it slid its way over the mounds of broken concrete, avoiding the sharp barbs of exposed rebars as it crept silently and unchallenged into the inner sanctity of the atrium.

Reese let out a loud snore and woke himself with a start. His hand squeezed the grip of the launcher and his other arm snatched out, seizing the weapon from its companion's hold before he accidentally pulled the trigger. He'd only dozed off for a few minutes and his sudden arousal made him feel hung over.

"Shit!" He cursed, fingers burning from contact with the cold metal. He dropped the launcher in his lap and blew into his clasped hands, warming them in a balm of hot breath. It would become freezing in here soon with the damage to the building. He needed to shore the place up or find a nice cosy room in the back. Get a fire going. Get a _few_ fires going.

He went to get up, but his chest protested with a sharp pain, what he was certain was one, maybe two, cracked ribs from when the Monster kicked him across the hangar.

It was no use. He had to get Holden. If only so the medic could check him out. He ought to be feeling better now. Better than _he_ felt anyway. At the very least he could keep him from dying in his sleep or killing himself.

Reese groaned loudly as he heaved upwards to the edge of the couch, leaning forward to rest his upper body weight on his knees. After a moment he reached under his belly and pulled out the launcher, bringing it up for inspection. It was tired ritual by now, drummed into him since he was a child by Derek.

'_Always check your weapon between combat, Kyle.'_ He could hear him say. _'Never assume it works. Check! Check! Check!'_

The M320 grenade launcher was a strange looking thing when detached from its parent rifle. It looked like an oversized, one-shot pistol slapped together from mismatching parts and had a sliding shoulder stock thrown on for good measure.

He brought the thing forward and clicked open the barrel, the black cylinder flicking out to the side, spitting the unused grenade onto his lap. He lifted the weapon to the moonlight and looked down the riffled barrel. Clean enough. He clicked it back in, sans grenade, and tried the trigger. _Click_. Everything seemed fine and he reloaded the grenade and flicked on the safety.

'_Time to fetch Holden.'_

Groaning with sharp complaint he hauled himself onto stiffened legs, feeling several stone heavier than he remembered as he lumbered off in the direction of the refectory kitchens by way of the rabbit warren, groaning when he thought about climbing over the pile of rubble.

As he approached the entrance to the corridors, he came to a halt.

Something didn't feel right.

Reese glanced around, digging out his flashlight and shone it down the corridor. There was nothing there. Turning around he flashed the cone of light around the atrium, moving along the line of windows of the nearby clothes store. The gangly silhouettes of mannequins and crooked clothes racks swept over the wall of the inner store, making shadow puppets of terminators and monsters in his mind's eye. The dummies of chiselled men still stood together, some clothed, some not, their masculinity let down spectacularly by a distinct lack of endowment – though the female one made him grin.

'_God damn-it, Reese. You're really getting paranoid.'_

He turned around and headed off down the ruined corridor.

Behind him in the clothes store, the female mannequin came back to life and pulled a fur-lined, imitation amauti from a hanger.

It would have been so easy to have attacked him just then, pounce on his back and tear the human apart, but the Monster remembered it was no longer a monster. It was down-sized and weakened, trapped in this imitation body its creator had set that would have to serve until it regained enough energy and protein to assume its former size and shape. Until then it would have to be patient and pick its battles carefully.

It dressed as quickly as it could, finding fragments of instructions of how to dress from its handful of basic files, clasping the belt together on a pair of khakis before it went to reach for some shoes.

"Fooled you…" Reese's voice was low and deadly, tinged with mockery as it emanated from somewhere behind her. "I'm not stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice. Put your hands up and turn around slowly."

The Monster took a breath, remaining calm and superior as it lifted its spindly arms and turned around to face him. Its vision was flooded by the beam from the human's flashlight, but it saw through the glare to the expression of Reese's face as it contorted in the sinking horror of recognition.

The grenade launcher drooped in his hand as realisation nearly knocked Reese over and his mouth hung open. He huffed and shook his head, not certain he could believe it.

"Out of everyone I thought it could be… I never thought it would be _you_…"

The Monster stared back at him, head swaying gently like a predator judging distance as it looked into him with jet black irises, the light of his torch glistening in them like jewels, as beautiful and unsettling as those of a starved jaguar – made infinitely more so as Reese stared wide-eyed into the innocent visage of _Allison Young_.

He felt himself shaking, his worn body overdosing on the smallest hit of adrenaline, knowing what this _thing_ was and what it had been. He swallowed hard at the reality of holding John Connor's girlfriend in his sights, feeling his nerve falter as his finger eased from the trigger.

"This _can't_ be happening…" His voice was a hoarse murmur. "You _can't_ be real…"

The Monster stood silent. Watching him with childish eyes. Unable or unwilling to talk. The effect made it seem chillingly unpredictable.

"What did they do? Kill Ally and make you to replace her?" His mind whirled, trying to put it together fast and see the sense of it. "What did Skynet do when you went…?"

It hit him like a gut kick, deduction rushing him, the result clearer than a summer's day from childhood.

Skynet had replaced Allison with a machine. This _thing_. Then when it turned on them and was disposed of to the Arctic they would have tried again, a thousand times if necessary, eliminated the flaws of her genetic formula and sent it straight into Serrano. They'd have to. Because a machine that looked like Allison had only one purpose.

Reese felt the bottom of his world fall away and his rage boiled over. He took aim and pulled the trigger.

_Click._

Horror sank down his spine in cold needles as the launcher jammed. He flipped it open, reloaded, and pulled the trigger again.

_Click._

Reese swallowed hard, eyes rising slowly from the weapon.

'_Oh shit…'_

The Monster looked up from the end of the barrel to meet his gaze, skewering him with ravenous intent. Her mouth widened, ruby lips parting in a voracious smile over jagged, triangular teeth.

Reese turned and bolted from the store. He had to reach Holden and get his sidearm.

The Monster burst through the window and landed on top of him, knocking him down onto the unyielding marble in a hail of shattered glass and sunk her teeth into his shoulder.

Reese roared in agony and rolled over, flipping her off his back and swung the grenade launcher down like a baton, clubbing her in the side of the head. She snarled as he loomed over her and caught his arm in a crushing grip, squeezing the muscles in his forearm and causing his hand to clench. He squeezed the trigger with his finger and the jam came lose, firing the stubborn grenade with a deafening squeal where it slammed into a wall, showering them in plaster dust and concrete ejecta.

Reese broke her hold and rolled onto his knees, tossing the spent launcher aside and drew his knife, flipping it into an ice-pick grip and drove it down at the Monster with everything he had.

His thrust stopped short of her chest, his entire strength and body weight held off by a pair of skinny arms that looked weaker than chopsticks. He bared his teeth and heaved down harder, glaring into her eyes as they struggled, the trembling tip of the dagger only inches away.

"JUST… _FUCKING…_ DIE!!!"

The Monsters eyes were crazed, like it was enjoying this. The fighting and the blood thirst whetting its appetite. A rivulet of Reese's blood rolled from the corner of her mouth as her jaws parted and a feral, guttural sound rumbled up in her throat.

Suddenly her legs scissored outwards and clamped around his waist like a vice, crushing his torso and his strength faltered. She struck him in the side of the head, spinning him over onto his back until she was on him and her mouth went for his throat.

Reese reacted with his forearm, just getting it between them as her jaws snapped shut above his eyeball and saliva dripped on his cheek. He tried frantically to reach the launcher with his other hand has she pushed down, desperate for anything as the bone in his arm began bending painfully and she inched closer to his jugular and it river of metallic nectar.

A gunshot tore through the air and the Monster stiffened. The light faded in her eyes and she grimaced.

Reese blinked as he felt her strength vanish and reacted with military instinct.

He reached up and swung his arm hard around her throat, clamping around her neck and rolled over on the jagged debris until he had her in an inescapable reverse headlock. He avoided her arms as they flayed wildly and he twisted with all he had left.

There was a sickening snap and the Monster's body went limp.

Reese held on for several seconds, yanking violently two more times to ensure the spine was completely severed before pushing off in a rumpled, breathless heap. For a few seconds he just laid still, breathing hard, head swimming until the adrenaline ebbed.

He rolled onto his side and saw the bullet wound in the Monster's back, looking over quickly to the entrance to the rabbit warren where Holden leant feebly in the doorframe, like a chain smoker that had just run the hundred metre, smoke curling from the 9mm as it dangling loose in his hand.

"Is it dead already?!" The medic demanded in exasperation.

"Yeah…" Reese's breathing began to ease and he looked over at the body. He chuffed with morbid humour. "Short of cutting her head off and driving a stake though her heart."

Holden made a half chuckle. Then he looked from the Monster to Reese.

"I'll go find an axe…"

####

Deep beneath the monolithic cooling towers of Serrano Point there was a subterranean complex of unrivalled magnitude. Delving through soil and granite was a catacomb labyrinth, far from sunlight and civilian eyes in a honeycomb of vault-like chambers between endless tunnels of reinforced concrete, welded steel, and the crushing weight of earth. It had been built in the last years of human civilisation for the storage of dangerous, radioactive material.

On the day the world ended, less only a fraction of this facility had been used for purpose. Half a dozen storage cells filled to capacity with spent nuclear fuel and transuranic material entombed forever within form cast sarcophagi – the rest had lay empty, converted for another purpose now it was firmly in the hands of the Resistance. What was once designed as a repository for the most toxic substances known to man was now home to hundreds of people – a refuge established after its capture for what remained of the continent's native inhabitants that had not been culled by Skynet.

Moreover however, it was a military installation. Serrano Point was the main beachhead in North America and the new headquarters of Tech-Com. While the civilians remained on the higher sub-levels, Tech-Com controlled the plant on the surface, the surrounding hillsides, and the vast facility beneath, some of it filled with all manner of Skynet hardware they had been only too happy to appropriate from the retreating machine army.

The day the first soldiers had secured the lower levels was every tech's birthday, Easter, and Christmas rolled into one.

What had been intended for nuclear waste had been used by Skynet to store things just as deadly to the survival of humankind. Many of the vaults had been used for storage of munitions, vehicles, experimental technology, and countless intelligence anecdotes that had painted a clear picture of Skynet's intentions for a massive counteroffensive that it had planned to launch. The surprise attack and capture of Serrano had put a hefty dent in those plans, but it was still a cold and sobering thought that the Resistance had dodged such an imminent bullet.

In one of the chambers the walls, floor, and ceiling had been inlayed with a void of lightweight metal framing and acrylic glass panels to create an achromatic chamber of stark white – a clean room Skynet had used as a maintenance hub for its infiltration terminators. After falling into Resistance hands, Connor had ordered it to be converted using the blueprints of the prototype for the reprogramming lab he had experimented with before building the finished version on the rig. After recent events, he was glad that as a rule, he always kept a backup of everything.

General Connor sat in that very chamber now, looking down on the central table amidst the gyroscopic array, primitive and less polished than the finished version, running his eyes up and down the new life he had created only hours earlier with the help of the liquid metal terminator.

For better or worse, it was done. The machine known as Allison Phillips was reprogrammed.

The act itself had felt like a twisted cross between birth and euthanasia – the mercy killing of a terminally ill patient for the necessary organs and raw material to build another life. He had watched as he pressed the button and chip had been erased in a few seconds, wiping the slate clean of memory and personality, every shred that made her 'Allison', leaving only the master core programming behind – an unalterable vanguard of Skynet directives that was tied inexorably to the collection of programs that allowed her to process and interpret data – how to move, how to talk, how to analyse and have sensation – every basic instruction that weaved together to form the underpinning of her unique and precious consciousness.

Whilst it might have been possible to alter this program, would she be able to function again afterwards? Write her name? Tie shoelaces? String a sentence together? Tell the difference between a dog and a cat? Even a single error in the human brain could impede it forever. Far more importantly though – would she still be capable of the things no terminator had ever been before?

Sapience? Introspection? The orchestra of passion, motion and emotion? It was brain surgery in the silicon sense.

With other terminators it had been relatively easy to alter a copy of the master program and rewrite it from scratch, remove the Skynet influence through a painstaking though onetime process of trial and error. But those machines, even the T888s, were not nearly as sophisticated as her.

It had taken days to map out and make the minuscule alterations that would change her in the sparing way he hoped, fundamentally altering the processes of her perceptions without damaging her. Over that he had implanted a layer of interconnecting programs that would act as a filter to the hardwiring beneath, allowing additional tiers of thought and examination to take place before she decided upon any action. He had tapped out source code until his fingers hurt, blessedly augmented by the T-1001's greater speed and efficiency and after days of ceaseless struggle their work was finally completed – an atrocious struggle marred by setbacks, arguments, and crushing avenues of failure before the hard-earned elation of victory was finally achieved.

As a whole, very little had actually been changed. She would retain the intrinsic qualities of her unique design – abstract thought, sentience, individuality – everything that made her superior to any other terminator. It was interesting in itself that the machine-god had gone so far, broken the rules of its own creation, but the requirements of a duplicate personality had made it a calculated necessity.

You couldn't fit a V12 engine in a go-cart.

After the ordeal, he and the T-1001 had parted ways once again and he had gone straight to his new quarters, imbibing several measures of amber medicine and falling instantly into a deep and exhausted sleep. After seventeen hours he had risen again, feeling like a reanimate corpse and brought himself up to speed with a conference of his generals on everything he had missed before making haste to the lab where she was right where he left her.

Now here he sat, preparing to switch her back on and face the moment of inimitable truth.

Connor didn't know exactly what was going to happen. There was a real possibility that she might never wake up at all, that his meddling was too liberal and she would crash in a nanosecond without the authority of the rigid and logical underpinning of Skynet's core program.

She would have a choice. She would not have to follow programmed directives if she didn't want to. It would be entirely her prerogative one way or the other. It was what he had come to learn was the greatest gift a machine could be given.

The ability to choose.

Not the _right_ to choose or the _privilege_, but the simple capacity of making a single decision that was entirely one's own and not the compelled result of entrenched commands.

The general in him had considered just making her loyal off the bat, a happy little warrior that would die for the Resistance, no questions asked. But the human being in him had wanted deep down to reach out, give the touch of humanity to something inhuman and allow it to grow on its own. Human beings had such a tried and accomplished history of despoiling and uglifying what was beautiful. Just this once, Connor had wanted to it to remain.

Taking hold of his nerve and praying silently, he reached out and inserted her chip into the CPU port, pressing down the fold of scalp like the hairpiece of a china doll and watched and waited with baited breath.

For an interminable era, nothing seemed to happen.

Then her eyes fluttered open and she turned her head towards him. She recoiled in confusion.

"Don't be frightened," He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder as the other cupped her hair. "Everything's going to be alright."

She blinked at him, looking his features all over in search of some ungraspable recognition. Her brow furrowed so slightly is was almost indiscernible.

"Who are you?"

John felt the wrecking ball of ambivalence collide with his heart. There was elation that she was awake and functional, intelligent and aware. It had worked! But still a sliver of his consciousness despaired that the person he loved was truly gone forever.

"My name's John Connor. What's yours?"

This was the next little acid test. Now he would see if the tiny, self-fulfilling program he had added last would work as intended – comparing the thousands-strong litany of human names that were appropriate and select one she instinctually preferred. Every person needed a name. It was the first gift given by a parent for a child to be identified with forever.

"Cameron." She said firmly. "My name is Cameron."

John rolled his mouth around the word, deciding whether he liked it and if there were any unfortunate rhymes. He frowned as a sudden horror occurred to him.

"Isn't that a boy's name?" He blurted.

Her eyes drew dangerously together.

"Alright… _Cameron_ it is."

Despite the situation's gravitas he found himself smiling like school kid, wondered and amazed as anyone did in the presence of a newborn life. Suddenly he became aware of his proximity and pulled back into his chair to give her space.

"Do you know what you are, Cameron?"

Her eyes turned to the ceiling, bringing her hands to her face where she examined the regenerated flesh, the acoustics of the room amplifying each of her scrutinies. "I'm a machine. A terminator. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton." As the words left her mouth her vision became inlayed by a heads-up display, bombarding her with a thousand applets of useful information about herself and the world around her.

A chronometer began tracking time, a compass swivelled, and a directive flashed in front of her in vehement red, demanding she take action immediately.

SUBJECT IDENTIFIED: JOHN CONNOR

TERMINATE

Cameron looked up at the man she'd just met, considering the edict objectively for a moment. There was a comfort to be taken in orders, especially for someone that had never had to think for themselves. She felt the physical strength in herself and the urge to flex that potential. It would be such a simple matter to lash out, grab his throat in her hand and crush his windpipe, or snap his neck, pull his spinal column from his body.

John frowned slightly, curious and incautious. "What are you thinking about?"

She stared at him for a few moments, cocking her head to the side as she studied him. He looked very tired. Not so much in body, but his eyes delved deep into an exhausted soul. He had the look of a man that had just come through a drawn out ordeal of fear and worry, been sick with it, suffered all that he was capable of suffering. Cameron didn't know how she knew this, but she did, and somewhere inside her twinged a cord of empathy.

John had been so kind to her already, and nothing inside her made her want to hurt him. She wasn't built to be cruel and neither did she choose to be.

She gave him a tiny smile.

"Nothing."

TERMINATION OVERIDE

"I'm not thinking about anything."

He returned the smile and offered her his hand. "Okay then." She took it and he helped her upright on the platform, helping her past the complex gyro to swing her legs over the side and sat down quietly beside her, watching as she looked down at herself for the first time. He grinned as she flexed the toes on her bare feet and she tugged the white gown away from her chest, looking down to see what was there.

"John?" She turned to him, voice small and timid, an intangible whiff of instinct shying her from the answer. "Where did I come from?"

Connor felt a part of his world fall down. Cold descended with a barbed swallow as his smile vanished, despite the virtual certainty that this terrible question would be among the first she would ask. He had wrestled with it last night and throughout his dreams with what he would say to her. How he would explain. What words he could possibly use that would do justice to it all and spare her the inevitable burden. But do you look an innocent in the eyes and explain that for them to exist, the person you loved had to die?

The same way you tell a man half your age that he's your father.

_You don't._

His smile returned, tinged with regret, and he squeezed her hand with reassurance. "You were created by an artificial intelligence called Skynet – a computer system that is trying to exterminate mankind and its allies. _Us_. We're called the Resistance." He swallowed the lump and took the plunge. Sometimes a kind lie was better than the terrible truth. "There was an accident. You were hurt and failed your mission. I reprogrammed you so that you don't have to follow orders or programming if you don't want to. You're free. And I'll teach you everything you want to know. You're safe with me. With _us_." His promise was that of the kindness and warmth of an omniscient father.

"But if I'm a machine…" She was curtailed with a dismissal wave.

"There are lots of machines on our side. Lots of humans that aren't." She frowned and he tried to think. He needed an explanation that was an absolute. That was how you explained things to a child. "If you want to destroy and enslave, you're with _them_. If you want to live and be free, you're with _us_. It doesn't matter _what_ you are anymore."

Her frown deepened at the thought of the unknown that lay ahead. "What will I do in the Resistance?"

Connor's smile returned. He'd already thought about that. "Well," He began, making it as casual as he could, but still somehow feeling like a salesman. "I'm the leader of the Resistance. A couple of my bodyguards recently had with an… _accident_. I need someone to watch my back. You'd be working for me. Where I go, you'll go. So you'll get to see lots of things." He prayed she would say yes as he gave an affable shrug, determined not to overcook this. "I mean, if you're interested?"

Cameron pondered it for all of a second.

####

In another part of Serrano Point, white smoke curled around the stark light of a laptop computer screen in the darkness of the Engineers' quarters. The chamber was about the size of a garage and with Phillips' constant smoking had an atmosphere thicker than an opium den. He had just moved in and what possessions he had requisitioned from the base stores were still packed in numerous boxes around the room awaiting their inevitable decanter. He had put in the request to the quartermaster for 'necessary supplies' before they had even touched down a few hours ago and it had all been waiting when he arrived.

Desk, chair, bed, table, computer, phone – ice machine, mini-fridge, drinks cabinet – all the necessities.

A genius _needs_ his little luxuries.

Inside he was still seething over the mothballing of _Keadas_ and his carelessness with Perry in the lab. From now on he would be more militant in his counter-surveillance. He took some comfort though that he had saved all data and material pertaining to the project, his little labour of love, and their had been no real physical setback to his work. With the right resources and the quelling of faint hearts, it could continue as though it had never been interrupted.

One day, once the dust had settled, and in spite of Connor's veto – _Keadas_ would live again. He would make sure of it. The project might be politically toxic now, a poison chalice from which no one in military authority would drink – but nothing lasted forever. When the climate eventually shifted, the wheel finally turned, and opinion was cultivated in the right direction, Phillips would resurrect it, his baby's faux start forgotten and whitewashed like the troubled beginnings of nuclear power.

Even the most radioactive material had a half-life.

More than anything, he was still reeling from Connor's recent side-step into madness – the little episode that had recently deprived him, and indeed the entire Resistance, of a veritable wealth of resources. Even the mere committal, let alone ultimate sacrifice of so many assets to the rescue of a single soldier was something he never thought the man capable of, and he was sure by now it had disseminated down the ranks as a seed of discord amidst the general's senior staff and his lieutenants in the field.

It was possible of course that Phillips wasn't aware of the full facts, and that the mission to Svalbard was a task of some importance he was hitherto unaware of. But he doubted it. _Like hell it was important!_ All they had to do was pick up a box of seeds for the _Ashnan Study_! Something else had gone on two days ago when they all left the oil rig in a hurry, and he was going to find out what.

From now on, he would be keeping a close eye on this '_Kyle_ Reese'.

His finger sprang off the keyboard after skipping through a digital recording in five-second intervals, finally reaching what it was he was looking for. He sat the cigar to the corner of his mouth and curled his legs beneath him on the bed, drawing the laptop closer for a better look, face bathing in the greyscale light as he tapped play, hitting the repeater once the seconds of blurred activity were over and the selected footage began an endless repeating loop.

Phillips gazed at the screen with idle interest, more curious than anything. Then his attention began to grow. He sat up straighter and furrowed his brow, finger joggling the speed as what began as offhand curiosity bloomed into all-out obsession, drawing him past the point of no return as he reviewed the last few seconds of footage from the HK-Predator's gun camera.

Before long his eyes had become lascivious opals, head shaking in refusal, transfixed on what he was seeing until his finger jabbed pause, freezing the video on a single image in the instant before the Banshee hit, only a frame before it all cut to static and centred the target it had engaged in the middle of the picture.

The cigar fell from his mouth and landed on the bedcovers. His attention never left the screen.

What looked back at him out of the shimmering liquid crystal made his skin tingle and his blood turn to ice – the face of something he had never imagined could exist as it stared back at him with the jet black eyes of a predator beyond a maw of jagged teeth. The image was a still of pure carnage, a frame of rage and ferocity to the nth degree that if properly directed would slaughter anything and everything in its path.

The breath pushed out of him and left him weak in its wake. He was awed. _Dumbstruck_. For the first time truly lost for words save for one thing that wheezed out of him with a timorous smile.

"_Beautiful_…"

His hand reached over to his nightstand, clicking the lamp on and reached into his leather satchel. After routing aside documents, pens, and a Chinese finger trap, he found it, pulling out the crimson glass vial and held it up to the light. His eyes rolled along the brownish-red tint that hugged the inner walls before reaching the printed label.

_#715 – "Young, Allison" specialist infiltrator – unknown series – 'Technica Opus Keadas'_

He twirled the tube into a triumphant fist and his mouth stretched into a smile.

####

SYSTEM INTERUPT

RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC

Steve the terminator opened his eyes as he lay on his back in the snow, looking up into the ragged clouds that swept above him in the sky as the higher functions of his CPU came back online. Then he flipped over violently and exploded into action, struggling onto all-fours as he looked around for the attacking Monster and scrambled back to his feet, preparing to assault the creature again before it had time to recover.

"Easy tiger!"

Steve whirled at the voice and came up against the figure of Reese as he leant against the side of a snowmobile, comfortable and relaxed, the terminator's plasma rifle clutched gently in his gloved hands.

"I'm afraid it's all over, Steve-o. You missed the big finish." Reese made a show of checking his watch. "It's been about forty-odd hours since the Monster bought the farm."

The machine blinked as it chewed over the human's euphemism with distaste, taking the moment to glance around at the continuous white that surrounded them in almost every direction. He quickly surmised that he had been brought to this location on the back of the snowmobile and dumped, likely unceremoniously, onto the snow of a gradual incline that crested in the distance, what lay beyond obscured from view. He looked in the opposite direction and saw the rocky line of the shore, the dark water lapping gently against a beach of grey stones and pebbles that shrank in both directions into the distance.

He turned back to Reese.

"The Monster is defeated?"

"_Terminated_." Reese quipped, pondering idly that whoever between the three of them that had dealt the Monster's death blow might never be determined.

Not long after the final skirmish on the floor of the atrium, Holden and Reese had decided to take no chances. Braving the storm once again they had brought the humanoid remains to the edge of the burning hangar, the flames still raging hard and kicking up the airfield's temperature to something remarkably bearable. There Reese had dug an impromptu hollow between a pair of sastrugi and they had thrown the body in, using a plastic container of kerosene from an old heating furnace and some methylated spirit to soak it liberally before setting it alight, watching carefully to ensure that it burnt down completely to a charred, carbonised crisp.

After what they had been through, neither would settle for anything less than absolute certainty that it was finally gone, no matter what new form it had taken, and with hardened hearts they had religiously presided over the Monster's funeral pyre. It was during this time that Reese had gone for a cleansing stroll, thinking of Allison and how it had felt like a cremation before he stumbled across Steve, half buried under a snowdrift. Nearby had been the plasma rifle.

The reactivated machine nodded with austere satisfaction, twitching his head just slightly as his primary objective was marked complete and his standing directives reasserted their authority.

He advanced toward the sergeant with obvious intent.

"_Whoa!_" Reese sprang off from the snowmobile like it had just caught fire and lifted the rifle to the ready. "Hold it!"

Steve stopped, looking remorselessly into the human. No fear. No hesitation. No pity or remorse. It was colder than the land around them and in a flick of a switch was his enemy again.

Reese shook his head, never more clear on the fact that he was dealing with a machine. "You fuckers just don't give up do you?!"

Whatever remorse he may have felt abotu betraying his one-time partner vanished, the pre-emptive action of removing Steve's chip vindicated a hundred times over. Despite appearances, these things were not people. They were machines in every sense. There was no bargaining or reasoning with a machine. It was designed to kill and exterminate and it would never stop until every one of them was dead.

"You'd have really killed me just now. After all we've been through."

They weren't questions. He already knew the answers.

"Of course." Steve stated flatly, as though it were the plainest thing in the universe. "I'm a terminator."

Reese released a thwarted breath that crystallised on the wind, shaking his head in disappointment.

"I guess I should've known. Is it really that easy for you?" He wasn't about to let this slide, he wanted to see if a robot could be made to squirm. "How can you trust someone to have your back then kill them a second later? Why'd you even bother saving my life?"

He watched patiently as the terminator cocked its head, at least giving the answer the benefit of thought before answering.

"I did what was necessary for the mission. _Nothing_ is more important than the mission."

Reese found it somewhere in himself to give a small smile at that. At least they could agree on something, but his desire for some sliver of repentance was a lost cause. You couldn't shame the shameless.

"I'll remember that. Might come in handy one day." He gazed at the stoic machine before nodding off past its shoulder, down the shoreline to the craggy face of a mountain in the misty distance. "Start walking in that direction. If you follow the coast then after about thirty-five miles or so you'll find an old mining town called Barentsburg. You should be safe there until Skynet comes looking for you."

Steve turned slowly, following the human's gaze as he listened to the instructions and frowned, turning back to Reese utterly perplexed. He had run the numbers in the instant before he went to attack, the chances of reprieve in the face of failure hardly worth calculating. Suspicion clouded his thought processes in the wake of such a magnanimous act of charity.

"_Why?_"

Reese shrugged, not entirely understanding it himself. Being human, he didn't need to. "You saved my life, now I'm saving yours." He stated simply, as though it were the plainest thing in the universe. The machine's frown deepened. "It's a human thing. _Mercy_. _Compassion_. Treat others as you'd like to be…" He shook his head with futility. "You wouldn't understand."

For several seconds, Steve regarded him coldly, perhaps making the effort to try and comprehend or at least relishing the opportunity to observe a human first hand that had completely lost his mind. That had certainly been Holden's reaction when Reese had told him what he intended that morning.

"I'll remember that. Might come in handy one day." The machine parroted his earlier remark.

"You're welcome." Reese began to step away before turning back. "By the way. If you have a change of heart on your little sojourn and decide to come back for us…" He hefted the rifle in his hands, careful to keep his thumb over the charge indicator on the wholly depleted battery. "I won't think twice, I'll just blow your fucking head off. Understand?"

The machine stood unmoving and looked back at him, causing his heart to skip several beats in fear that the ever observant sentinel had detected his bluff and was about to call it.

Then Steve nodded his head. "I understand."

Silent relief hissed out of Reese and he backed away, uneager to outstay his welcome and got far enough away from the watchful terminator before he was well out of striking range and all but home free. Before he did, he took one last look at the machine.

"See you round, Steve." He said, then smiled with a sardonic afterthought. "And watch out for polar bears."

Reese turned his back and walked away, ready to head off, breathing easier as he reached the snowmobile and prepared to climb onboard before the machine stopped everything with a single word.

"_Reese…?_"

The sergeant froze. His heart nearly jumped out of his chest as the sound of his own surname cut through him like a blade.

_It knew his name._ How long had it known who he was? He scoured his memory for the instant when his vigilance had slipped as his hand slid slowly around the belly of the oversized rifle. He turned steadily to face the treacherous machine, ready for imminent attack.

Snow and mist curled in the distance between them that in another time and place would be dust and tumbleweed. Time slowed down to an agony, loaded with tension as the two adversaries and one time allies regarded one another for the final time.

Then Steve's mouth curled into a wry and genuine smile before uttering the inimitable words that one day, in another time and place, under the guise of a federal agent and a high school science teacher, become his immortal trademark catchphrase.

"Thank you for your cooperation."

Reese watched then in silence as the machine turned around and trudged off through the snow, hydraulic limbs ploughing through the mounded ice drifts until Steve shrank into the distance, the imposing figure fading into the perpetual white and he disappeared into the swirling mist.

* * *

_Yeah… Steve was Cromartie all along. This was one of the earliest of my story concepts and is not something tacked on at the end. If you look back through the story you'll see that some of the things Cromartie says and does in the series he actually learnt from Kyle – and vice versa._

_Hope you liked it. Epilogue to come._

_Please read and review._


	11. Chapter 11

**NOTES**: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.

**SUMMARY**: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.

**DISCLAIMER**: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.

* * *

"**The Killer I Created"  
****Epilogue  
****T.R. Samuels**

"Here it comes… the monster's gonna get you…"

Slowly and with one digit at a time, John Connor walked his fingertips up a pair of tiny feet, prodding lightly at the rosy pink soles and listening to the obligatory giggles of his four-month old daughter. She began wriggling in his lap, face scrunching up into a silent guffaw as she anticipated what was to come, her tiny face awash with pure, unrestrained, infantile joy.

John's heart filled up like a balloon.

Even though he was prepared for it, he never truly realised what it was going to be like to become a father. The worry, the joy, the exhaustion, the momentousness of it all. Sometimes it rushed him and felt like too much, like he was coming apart at the seams with the awesome responsibility of an entire human life. 'Saviour of humanity' indeed. He was destined to be responsible for the lives of every human being left in existence. But then, in their secluded hideaway from the rest of the world – his family _was_ all that existed.

His fingers crept up onto the woolly fabric of her sleepsuit, walking their way slowly up her belly.

"There's no escape… watch out…"

John wondered if this was the way his father would have felt if he'd had the chance, whether _they_ would have played silly games together. He thought it was and it made his heart ache, like he was connecting though some tendril of metaphysics to the parent he never knew. It was just one more joy little _Sarah Connor_ brought into his life.

When she had been born, his mother had rushed to be there, completing as soon as possible whatever mission she'd been on and raced to the lighthouse. Things like that only happened once. He'd placed her into the arms of her grandmother and watched the fearsome woman's iron will dissolve in seconds, crying in a way he'd never seen as she'd kissed and fussed endlessly, counting fingers and toes and cooed over her for hours. Then when those perfect emerald eyes had opened and looked up into hers, she had fallen for her. Hard. Ten-fold when John told her what her name was.

'_Now no matter what happens, they'll always be a Sarah Connor.'_

Little Sarah's face widened into an open mouthed smile, freezing as she waited with bated breath the ecstatic conclusion to their game.

Johns' fingers sprinted the rest of the way, springing out to land gently on the sides of her face.

"Facehugger!"

He withdrew his hand and she let out a squeal of joy, wriggling in his arms with deceptive strength, laughing and gurgling so hard she gave herself the hiccups. John's smile stretched from ear to ear.

When she had woke him up a few minutes ago with her cries he had groaned that it was far too early and that work lay ahead, aching at the thought of getting up but wanting to anyway. Nothing was too much for little Sarah. Then as he picked her up and taken her in his arms he had remembered that today was Sunday, a holy day by anyone's measure, even the staunchest atheist, and all went right with the world.

"You're supposed to be getting her back to sleep."

John looked up as Cameron slipped into the room, a laundry basket clutched under her arm. It had been months since Sarah was born, but he was still getting used to his wife's slimmed physique.

"_Impossible!_" He looked down at the little bundle in his arms, his every word and expression ridiculously exaggerated. "_Nothing_ can make this little creature sleep! She's nuclear!"

Cameron raised an eyebrow, mouth curling furtively as she folded some freshly washed baby clothes into a dresser draw, listening to the little laughs as John rubbed Sarah's belly. "That's unlikely, John."

"Oh? Well then how do we explain all the nuclear waste she keeps producing, hmm?" His eyes never left Sarah as she looked up at him with a grin of mischief. "Last time she needed a change daddy had to get the gas mask from the wardrobe, didn't he?" He began tickling her feet and the fits of laughter began again.

Cameron slid the draw shut and looked over at father and daughter. Sometimes she wondering just who was bewitching who.

John groaned as he got to his feet, curling his arms beneath Sarah as he walked towards her mother. "Mommy's gonna look after you now for a little bit. I won't be gone long." Whenever they were together, Cameron had observed, John always insisted on telling Sarah everything that was going on and what was about to happen. She didn't have the heart to tell him that she had yet to develop the necessary speech perceptions to understand him.

Cameron reached out with cradled arms as he passed her over, sliding his hands out beneath her as Cameron took charge of their daughter, holding her close and running a biometric scan. Everything was fine. Sarah had always been very healthy.

"I'm gonna go take a shower." She favoured him with brief but pleasant glance, too wrapped up in her child as she stroked her cheek with the tenderness only a mother could bestow. John smiled and slipped quietly out of the door.

He glanced at the windowsill as he entered the living room. The clock read 5:27am. He groaned inwardly. _Too early._ The only time he ever usually saw the world this early was because he'd been up all night, not woke up to see it. John was not and never would be a 'morning person'. Nothing short of an imminent attack or the cries of his daughter could stir him at this hour. He was glad that it had been the latter.

In fact, ever since they had moved here to this isolated cabin, there had been no Skynet activity at all. That had been the plan. Before Sarah had been born he had always intended to move again, had found this place in a national park forest of Washington state, complete with a half-decent job in the nearby town. It was the perfect, out-of-the-way place for the two of them to disappear to and begin raising their daughter in peace.

John took a moment before performing his morning ablutions and headed for the fireplace. Aside from the bit of circulatory hallway between the two bedrooms and the bathroom at the back, the cabin was mostly open plan. The kitchen and lounge were pretty much the same thing and took up the majority of the rustic dwelling, six windows and a door the only portals to the snowy forest outside, the roof space a triangular void of crisscrossing timber. The walls were rolling tree trunks packed tight together with chinking mortar, the hearth a column of grey stone and so long as it stayed lit, easily kept the place cosy and warm.

John really liked it here.

In addition to its rustic charm and secure isolation, the cabin had been mercifully furnished with modern appliances by the owners, a delightful elderly couple that lived in town. A fridge and freezer, a washing machine and gas boiler in the daylight basement, no television but after a few weeks neither of them missed it. What _was_ available however, to John's constant relief, was a working phone line, even out to this distance so that he could stay in contact with his mom and Charlie.

When they had moved, John had made it sudden and without warning. He wanted to make sure that neither of them knew until it was done. Derek was no longer an issue – they'd heard nothing from him for almost a year now.

No one knew exactly where they were and John had devised the most elaborate system for identity challenge the Connors had employed yet. Nothing would compromise little Sarah's safety and he was always careful never to let slip any clues as to where they were. At first Sarah had been nearly distraught, John had known she would be, but in the end she had agreed and felt better for it knowing that they were safe and she and Charlie could concentrate on stopping Skynet.

In the living room, the dog lay spark out next to the embers of the log fire, gorged on turkey giblets and farting like a trooper as he warmed his bloated belly. He didn't do mornings either. John reached over him and opened the doors to the wood-burning stove, tossing in a few split tinders and dried pinecones, rousing the fire back to life. The dog opened an eye to look around, then went back to sleep.

"You're supposed to be a guard dog," John grumbled, swinging the doors shut with a metallic yawn. "Eat and sleep. That's all you do." He shook his head and patted him before heading back the way he came on his way to the bathroom. He locked the door and swung the shower lever, hearing the distant sound of the gas boiler rumble into action as he waved his hand under the warming spray. He picked up his toothbrush and looked in the mirror. What stared back nearly gave him a heart attack.

"Yikes!"

A quarter of an hour later, he stepped out of the bathroom feeling and looking decidedly more human, even more so after he brewed a little nouveau mug of espresso from the chic coffeemaker and downed it like a shot of bourbon. His evolution from haggard Neanderthal was now complete and the modern man called John Connor made his way quietly back into Sarah's room.

He peered around the door to find Cameron sitting in the rocking chair in the corner, little Sarah at her bosom beneath the folds of her dressing gown. He stifled a sigh. They looked so perfect together.

Cameron of course, being a terminator, didn't need to re-evolve every morning quite like he did. She looked great whether it was the break of dawn or the middle of the night. He loved and hated it about her. But then again, the whole purpose of evolution was to make things better, more _suitable_ for the task.

John grinned with a little pride in his partner. _You couldn't improve on perfection._

Cameron looked up and gave one of her brilliant smiles, the one that made him feel weak and unworthy, ready to drop to his knees and wrap his arms around her waist and thank her for saving him from a life of running and hiding, living in the fearful shadow of his destiny. Being with her made everything seem possible, that every obstacle that lay ahead was a surmountable challenge he no longer had to fear. She trusted him, believed in him, loved him, and in so doing had given him something he never imagined he would ever be entitled to.

A family.

"Hungry again?" He whispered, moving inside next to them, softly so as not to disturb Sarah from her morning feed.

Despite his preparations, John had been a little unclear as to how often Sarah would need feeding. Should it be when _they_ ate at mealtimes? Every hour? Should there be a schedule? As it turned out, Sarah was rather vocal on the subject and had her parents at her beck and call day and night. Last night in fact had a reanimated John hunched over a pan of boiling water, despite Cameron's logical objections, reheating a bottle of expressed milk at one o'clock in the morning. Cameron didn't need sleep and was perfectly willing to foot the majority of the leg work in caring for their daughter, but John didn't see it that way.

Caring for Sarah made him feel close to her, like they were connecting on a very deep and personal level. He was giving her what she needed to grow and survive – she was making _his_ life worth living. Actually, she made every struggle and hardship he had ever endured feel worth it, like everything had led to this and he was no longer a ticking clock or a plan waiting to happen. He felt like John Connor was actually and finally _happening _rather than a work-in-progress. Raising Sarah was not a drill or a preparation for some great task – it was _real_, the results plain to see – not some far off destiny that lay years ahead.

Sarah detached from her mother and hiccupped, settling back in Camerons' arms with a humungous yawn. She'd had her fill and was now ready to go back to sleep. John shook his head, still amazed that Cameron could even have children, let alone breastfeed. It was such a natural and human thing to do – such an incredible length for Skynet to go in order to convince that she was human.

He had thought about it at length actually, pondering the limitless depravities he knew of the machine-god's science, wondering whatever would have possessed it to give her these abilities. Rational and methodical reflection had settled on the logical answer after going over and over the recording of his meeting with Daniel Phillips, his mind unencumbered by Derek or his mothers' prejudices and paranoia. It was simple really.

Skynet had _never_ intended it.

How did it even create living tissue for its terminators? From scratch? _Unlikely_. It must have been cultivated from existing material – human prisoners – if not for Cameron herself then her lineage back to the first T800 must have had some natural beginnings, even if Skynet just copied the genetic code and recreated it. The problem with that was how to suppress a billion years of evolutionary instinct encoded in every strand of DNA that commanded its cells to propagate, reproduce and survive no matter what?

On some fundamental level, it would always want to subsist and multiply. Skynet's perverse designs could not be separated from those instincts any more than you could extract the flour from baked bread. Perhaps in Cameron, for whatever reason, life had found a way around the rules it imposed, a _loophole_ that Skynet missed, leaving its every machine power and synthetic enhancement to life's ruthless imagination.

_What things might life create in the face of such power?_

"What are you thinking about?" Cameron asked as she wrapped Sarah in the blanket, cocooning her so she was snug and secure.

John stared at her, then smiled and shook his head, dismissing his lugubrious thoughts. "_Nothing_…" He reached out with a finger and stroked his daughter's chubby cheek. "I'm not thinking about anything."

Together they carried Sarah to her crib as she drifted off, placing her down between the softwood sides onto the firm mattress. Cameron tucked her in as John arranged her teddy bears, positioning them around her like samurai guardians. With a flick of his hand he sent the crib gym in a delicate spin, the tiny bells and coloured reflectors jingling softly above her, sending a glitter of refracted light across the inside of the cradle.

"See you in a few hours," John leaned in a kissed her cheek, giving her belly a farewell pat. "Sweet dreams."

He clicked on the baby monitor and tiptoed to the door with ninjutsu stealth, opening it quietly and turning back in time to see Cameron kiss her goodnight before joining him in the hallway. He slid the door shut like they were disarming a bomb, turning the handle as he pulled it to and released it without a sound. Both of them breathed a sigh of relief.

After they had gone, little Sarah opened her eyes, sensing the absence of her parents and gazed up at the lightshow above. Her arms reached out to capture them, scooping at the air with her tiny fingers in vain as she was hypnotised to sleep. She felt very safe and secure, her belly full as a tick, her cuddly protectors standing vigilant around the perimeter of her bed, keeping any monsters at bay.

Sleep beckoned to her and she felt its weighty tug, pulling her down into dreams of things and places she had never seen or been, watching as the singular colour that always drew her fascination bled through to dominance amidst the twinkling lights.

She smiled as she saw it, so unlike the others in its remarkable beauty. A thing to be savoured and adored. She had already made the decision, even at this tender age, that of all the others she could see it was by far and away her favourite and would always be.

_Red_. Without any shadow of doubt. Her favourite colour was _red_.

Out in the hallway, John scrunched his face in a mock breakdown and slouched heavily into Cameron's arms. "I love her to pieces, but she's a handful sometimes."

Cameron bore his weight effortlessly as she patted his back. "You've been handling fatherhood very well, John. I'm impressed."

He lifted his head from her shoulder, grinning salaciously as his vigour returned. "_Impressed_, huh?" His eyebrows twitched up and down. "Does that mean it's reward time?"

Her mouth curled coyly. "Yes," John felt his heart sink for a fleeting instant, the way it always did when sex with Cameron was imminent. He felt his loins warm and he leaned in for a kiss.

"I will make you breakfast."

John froze. She planted a quick peck on his mouth and walked out of his arms towards the kitchen. Her absence was like having the blankets pulled off him on a winter's morning, nearly painful as the burgeoning activity in his pants fizzled out. Cameron could be a virginal tease sometimes and a kinky nymphomaniac the next. He loved and hated it about her.

Cameron twisted the dial on the cooker and one of the rings beneath the glass-ceramic cooktop reddened in the seconds she used to gather the various ingredients for pancakes. John slipped into a chair at the kitchen table, content with the conciliation prize of watching Cameron's shapely behind as she made him breakfast. He rested his chin in his hand, smiling like a cat, deciding he'd like to see the back of her head later on when he took her to their bedroom and a gave her a bit of…

"Wood?"

John froze and stared blankly. For an instant he was fourteen again and had just been caught watching porn. "_Huh_…?"

"You were going to chop some wood this morning, John. For the fire."

His eyes scrunched as he remembered. "Oh yeah. Umm…" He slid up from the table and made his way to the door, lifting his coat off the hanger and pulling out his hiking boots. "I'll go do some."

"You don't have to go _now_. Have your breakfast first."

He shrugged on the jacket and the zipper sang upwards. "It's okay. I won't be long. Some morning air will do me good."

Cold air rushed in as he headed out, fumbling a pair of gloves on as he walked across the timber porch and down some short steps, heading off around the rear of the house. He returned about ten minutes later with an armful of split timber, finding Cameron nowhere to be seen and a laid table with his breakfast waiting for him – a stack of dripping pancakes and blueberries, maple syrup, fresh coffee and orange juice, a slice of pink grapefruit to finish. The centre of the table was plush with condiments and a narrow vase sprouted the fully bloomed stem of a pink-white rose.

John offloaded the firewood into the basket next to the stove, wasting no time removing his coat and boots before seating himself down at the table. Camerons' pancakes should be a national treasure. Sweet and fluffy, perfect every time. He'd have them every morning if she didn't insist it only be a weekend treat. His health and vitality were always sources of concern for her. The last time she'd caught him smoking she'd nearly snapped both his hands off at the wrists and they'd been no sex for a week.

No way in hell was he enduring that again.

John finished his breakfast and washed it all down with the orange pulp remnants of his juice, retiring to the couch with his cup of coffee after he'd washed up and cleared the table. The dog groaned awake and rolled over, staring at him as his ears hung haphazardly around his face. He looked genuinely miffed that he'd missed breakfast and whatever morsel he could've guilted from his master.

"Don't worry…" He assured him. "You've got more giblets coming tonight."

As if understanding every word, the dog huffed out a laboured breath and rolled over back to sleep, happy and content.

John smiled and took a sip of his coffee, ears pricking when he heard the distant thump of the boiler clicking off. Cameron must have been in the shower and now she was finished. Terminator personal hygiene was something he hadn't thought of before meeting her, but in retrospect it made sense. They perspired, shed skin and got dirty like everyone else. It made sense that they'd have to bathe. They even got bad breath. John chuckled to himself at the spark of a memory in which Cameron had had her first bout with an electric toothbrush.

He heard the door to the bathroom open and bare feet pad across the timber floor behind him.

"How was the water? That boiler performing prop…" As he turned to face her his sentence died, his throat drying in seconds.

Cameron was leaning against the edge of the kitchen table just a few feet from him, her hair springy and damp, a fluffy white towel wrapped around her body from her armpits to the top of her thighs. Other than that – _nothing_.

"You said something about a 'reward', John?"

She walked around the edge of the furniture and John felt that feeling again – the one that made him want to drop to his knees before her, but he held firm. _For God's sake!_ She was his wife and there wasn't a part of her he wasn't intimately familiar with. How the hell did she do this to him?

Cameron reached down and hiked the hem of the towel up what little of her thighs it obscured, sliding herself forward gracefully and straddled his pelvis. Her arms moved around his neck and threaded her fingers into the hair at the back of his head. Her gaze was intense, desire obvious, like a hunger that burnt like fire. He slipped both hands up her thighs, beneath the towel, cupping the warm mounds of flesh he found.

"Is there something I can do for you, Mrs. Connor?" His voice was as cool as the morning air.

He found it hard to believe that there was once a time when he would have freaked out if a girl even spoke to him, clamming up like a barnacle and have nothing witty or interesting to say. He'd been the computer nerd with the psycho-mom the other kids learnt to avoid, awkward in his motions, fashion out of date, zero prospects with the ladies. That seemed a long time ago now.

_Now_ he was a married man and had begun a family. No fear, no uncertainty. With Cameron he had never felt that way. From day one he was comfortable, at ease, so much that he spilled his guts on their second meeting all about his father. He _never_ talked to anyone about his father. Maybe it was because she was a machine – it made it more comfortable for him. Maybe because she was Cameron. She was so easy to talk to, easy to be around, easy to understand, even more so to love.

Nothing about her was hard work or intimidating. Not to him. He _loved_ that about her.

"I love you, John." She said softly, leaning in for a gentle kiss. "Thank you for giving Sarah to me."

Something inside John constricted painfully, chocking him up with the ache of hearing the words he knew were so difficult for her to express, her imperfect programming so often falling short of what she felt and so desperately wanted to tell him.

"Thank you for having her. And I love you too."

They smiled at one another, a perfect moment in time he'd keep with him forever, carry a picture of it around in his head until the day he was put to rest.

With a deft flick of her hand Cameron undid the towel and slipping it off her body like a veil of silk, tossing it away where it sailed through the air and landed over the antlers of a taxidermied moose mask that hung above the fireplace. Oozing warm confidence and nuclear sex appeal, she leaned in close and threaded her arms behind her husband's neck as his gaze moved over her body.

"What do you think, John?"

John felt his lungs deflate as his eyes moved up and down the alabaster perfection of Cameron's naked figure. They'd done a lot of things together in the year they had been a couple, things that would make a hooker blush, had engaged in every one of his fantasies and plenty more besides from the online pantheon of human intercourse. Cameron was a _very_ quick study, and between him and Ann Summers, he'd been the best teacher he could.

"I think…" His mouth curled in a boyish grin. "I may have created a monster…"

Her mouth curled lustfully and she reached to undo his belt, taking John's mouth with hers before they sank down into each others' arms.

* * *

_The end. At least for now. I hope you've enjoyed this one as much as I've enjoyed writing it. More than anything it's been a great education for me and I think I've become a better writer for it._

_I'm thinking of doing an author's review as a chapter 12. __I'd go back and explore the origins and inspirations for the story, examine the characters, the symbolism and motifs, probably do a few paragraphs on each chapter, not to mention look at what I liked and disliked about it and what I learnt. Let me know what you think._

_Please read and review._


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